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plants have immune systems
The article below  emphasizes two important new developments in our 
understanding of  the plants immune system and in the process of 
alternate splicing of messenger RNA. In recent years it has grown clear 
that plants have an immune system bearing some similarity to the animal 
immune system. There has also been growing awareness that one gene  can 
express many different  protein products by splicing messenger RNA in 
alternative ways.Such splicing is very important in plant immunity.
Pages 392-398 volume 7 Trends in Plant Science
Alternative splicing of transcripts encoding Toll-like plant resistance 
proteins ¯ what's the functional relevance to innate immunity?
Tina Jordan, Sebastian Schornack and Thomas LahayeE-mail The
Abstract
Innate immunity in plants and animals shares many structural and 
functional homologies, which suggests an ancient origin of cellular 
defense mechanisms in both kingdoms. Pathogen sensing in animal innate 
immunity is mediated by Toll-like receptors (TLRs). These receptors have 
TIR (Toll/interleukin-1 receptor) domains and leucine-rich repeats, 
which are modules also present in many plant resistance (R) proteins. 
Molecular analysis of transcripts encoding animal TLRs and Toll-like 
plant R proteins revealed many cases of alternative splicing. Recent 
studies of the tobacco N and the Arabidopsis RPS4 genes, both encoding 
Toll-like plant R proteins, showed that intron-deprived genes have 
reduced or no activity, suggesting that alternative splicing is a 
crucial component in these signaling pathways. 
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