Salicylic acid is biosynthetically related to lignin, so I need to understand what happens with secondary plant cell walls when salicylic acid is applied in plants.
Phenolic content increases - so does carbohydrates - upto certain concentration - so liginin should increase - but we have also noticed SA induced cell wall damage as evident on increase in lipid peroxidation - so its a little tricky
I think you can quantify some lignin biosynthesis genes using qPCR after SA application, and try to use different SA concentrations in order to find a correlation between lignin gene expression and SA concentrations.
Good luck
qRT PCR may be a good option to be looked into, but I have some apprehensions - when you treat your leaves with SA - it might also trigger something like the "acid growth hypothesis -of auxin' - whereby there is a loosening of the cell wall in acidic pH. This in case of auxin is a immediate response and happens prior to gene action. SA being acidic should also do something similar at least in a localised manner. So even if SA does induce the lignin - genes, we have seen that it aleast does increase relative expression of PAL - the conclusion would need also to involve studies with confocal microscope imaging where you get very good insight into what is hapenning to the lignin in the cell wall as it gives excellent flourescent signals - some studies in a collaborating lab has been done in bamboo as we were interested in cellulose content vis-a-vis lignin as it is important in the paper industry.
Ghosh Sekhar Jayadri, Chaudhuri Shubho, Dey Nrisingha, Pal Amita*. “Functional characterization of a serine-threonine protein kinase from Bambusa balcooa that implicates in cellulose overproduction and superior quality fiber formation”. BMC Plant Biology 2013;13:128.
Vineeta Rai, Jayadri Sekhar Ghosh, Amita Pal, Nrisingha Dey (2011) Identification of genes involved in bamboo fiber development. Gene 478 (2011) 19-27.
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