Hi,
The thing is that plants do not actually have “apoptosis”. Apoptosis (in animals) is a process, which is commonly described as a set of essential makers, including the cell shrinkage and being consumed by the macrophages soon after. Plants do indeed have a lot of those (laddering of the dna, cellular membrane blebbing, cytochrome c release), but that plant programmed cell death is not entirely the same as apoptosis. Plants have different types of cell death with quite different manifestations (see review below), and thereby it might be crucial to select and further look for descriptions of the specific type you are interested in.
As for the genes involved, what exactly are you looking for? If you are looking for the caspases, plants have none. They have an entirely different type of death proteases, which whoever function in the same manner and have almost the same specificity. One type is so called “phytaspases” - serene proteases of the subtilisin family and the other type are members of the papain-like family. Another example is the so called “vacuolar protease” (VPE), a cystein protease, the mediates cell death in plants. Also, metacaspases seem to be involved, but not too specific.
Please read:
[4] - a concise review of the PCD types in plants
[1, 2] f- or the plant caspase-like proteases (follow the links in the papers for the metacaspases)
[3] - abut the VPE
[5] - the “mitochondrial” part of plant PCD
1. Chichkova, N.V., et al., Phytaspase, a relocalisable cell death promoting plant protease with caspase specificity. EMBO J, 2010. 29(6): p. 1149-61.
2. Vartapetian, A.B., et al., A plant alternative to animal caspases: subtilisin-like proteases. Cell Death Differ, 2011. 18(8): p. 1289-97.
3. Hara-Nishimura, I. and N. Hatsugai, The role of vacuole in plant cell death. Cell Death Differ, 2011. 18(8): p. 1298-304.
4. van Doorn, W.G., et al., Morphological classification of plant cell deaths. Cell Death Differ, 2011. 18(8): p. 1241-6.
5. Lam, E., N. Kato, and M. Lawton, Programmed cell death, mitochondria and the plant hypersensitive response. Nature, 2001. 411(6839): p. 848-53.
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