Abstract
Some amphiphilic molecules are able to interact with the lipid matrix of plant plasma membranes and trigger the immune response in plants. This original mode of perception is not yet fully understood and biophysical approaches could help to obtain molecular insights. In this review, we focus on such membrane-interacting molecules, and present biophysically grounded methods that are used and are particularly interesting in the investigation of this mode of perception. Rather than going into overly technical details, the aim of this review was to provide to readers with a plant biochemistry background a good overview of how biophysics can help to study molecular interactions between bioactive amphiphilic molecules and plant lipid membranes. In particular, we present the biomimetic membrane models typically used, solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance, molecular modeling, and fluorescence approaches, because they are especially suitable for this field of research. For each technique, we provide a brief description, a few case studies, and the inherent limitations, so non-specialists can gain a good grasp on how they could extend their toolbox and/or could apply new techniques to study amphiphilic bioactive compound and lipid interactions.
Highlights
Plants are fixed organisms, subject to many environmental constraints
Coarse-grained representations, in which small groups of atoms are described using one bead per group, allowing reduced simulation time, improve sampling [98], and represent the membrane with up to several thousand lipid molecules from different species and for simulation times up to hundreds of microseconds. These two techniques have been extensively applied in the past decade to study mammalian, bacterial, and organelle membranes, leading to accurate representations of the plasma membrane (PM), lipid nanodomain formation mechanisms, membrane dynamics, and perturbations induced by a wide range of active molecules
Biophysics provides tools that are perfectly tailored to the investigation of molecular interactions, especially in the case of lipid-membrane-bound amphiphiles
Summary
Subject to many environmental constraints. In particular, they have to cope with a wide variety of pathogens. Plants lack mobile cells dedicated to immune responses. They are protected by preformed physical barriers such as cuticular waxes on the plant scale, and cell walls on the cell scale. Plants 2020, 9, 648 to be recognized by membrane receptors, some amphiphilic molecules directly interact with plant PM lipids while still triggering defense responses in plants [2]. Because they interact with the lipids from the plant PM, elucidating the mode of perception of these amphiphilic elicitors may require a specific approach compared to studying the receptor-recognized ones. We present an overview of several biophysical techniques especially well-suited to investigating the molecular interactions between amphiphiles and lipid membranes
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