A Role for Nonsense-Mediated mRNA Decay in Plants: Pathogen Responses Are Induced in Arabidopsis thaliana NMD Mutants

Nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) is a conserved mechanism that targets aberrant mRNAs for destruction. NMD has also been found to regulate the expression of large numbers of genes in diverse organisms, although the biological role for this is unclear and few evolutionarily conserved targets have been identified. Expression analyses of three Arabidopsis thaliana lines deficient in NMD reveal that the vast majority of NMD-targeted transcripts...