A theoretical study on the cross-talk of stress regulatory pathways in root cells

Abstract

The plants developed more dedicated regulatory pathways than the animals did to response various environment stresses, since they could not run away. The cross-talk among the pathways generally introduce non-trivial regulatory behaviors, from which the plants may benefit. For better understanding the regulatory mechanism due to cross-talk, we study in this work two entangled stress regulatory pathways in root cells. A quantitative model of the regulatory network is constructed in the simplest fashion. An analytic parameter-free approach is then employed to analyse the response tendencies. It leads us to a simple constraint on the non-linear regulatory exponents. Under the constraint, a transition to the non-monotonic growth inhibition happens at finite concentration of ABA, due to which the plants could survive from cold/heat stress. The parameter-free tendency analysis would also be applied to further experiments, especially in the case of insufficient data for multi-parameter fitting.