Recently, Jianqiang Wu Group at the Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, in Kunming, China revealed that the parasitic plant dodder can bridge nutrient systemic signals inter-hosts. Nitrogen (N) deficiency is a common challenge to plants worldwide. In the dodder bridged cluster, whether dodder can also mediate nutrient systemic signals still unknown. In this research, they found that in the dodder mediated cluster, once a host suffered nitrogen stress, systemic signals will be generated and transmitted to another host through the dodder. Interestingly, transcriptome and methylome analysis indicated that certain systemic signals were also transferred from the N-replete to N-depleted cucumber hosts. Importantly, N stress also induced many long-distance mobile mRNA transfers between dodder and hosts, and the bilateral N-systemic signaling between N-replete and N-depleted hosts had a strong impact on the inter-plant mobile mRNAs. This study reveals that dodder facilitates plant-plant communications under N-stress conditions by enabling extensive bilateral N-systemic signaling between different hosts. This work was published in Plant Physiol. (2021), 185: 1395-1410. doi: 10.1093/plphys/kiaa004. PubMed: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33793912/
