PR4 protein from Arabidopsis: its role on plant defence and its potential biotechnological use

Abstract: Plants possess an innate immune system enabling them to defend themselves against pathogen attack. The accumulation of newly synthesized pathogenesis-related proteins (PRs) is one of the most studied inducible plant defence response. At present, a large number of PRs have been characterized and grouped into 17 families. Biological activity and function are already known for most PRs classes, but for some of them they have not been yet completely elucidated. In particular, PR4 is one of the less characterized families.
In this paper we report on the isolation of a PR4 protein from Arabidopsis, named HEL. Its
functional characterization in terms of antifungal and ribonuclease activity is also reported.