Plant Death: Short and Long Life Span to Immortality

Death is a universal physiological process that occurs in all living beings and results in termination of normal cellular activities required for life. In animals, loss of function of vital organs such as the liver, heart, or brain becomes a cause of death; however, in plants, death of a whole plant body is a cumulative effect of activities of all the cells associated with different organs such as stem, leaves, and roots. Therefore, in the case of plants, it becomes important to understand the plant cell death that will help to understand plant death. Cells of a plant tend toward death by two modes: controlled mode which is called programmed cell death (PCD) and uncontrolled mode called necrosis mediated by external factors such as infection and injury. PCD is generally mediated through apoptosis and autophagy. Programmed cell death (PCD) is a genetically regulated phenomenon of selective elimination of target cells that are either under pathological conditions or unwanted for the organism’s normal growth and development. PCD renders some hallmarks like blebs in the cell membrane, lobe formation in the nuclear membrane, DNA nicks resulting to DNA ladder of 200 bp, and downstream activation of caspases. Here, we described importance of programmed cell death and other modes of death adopted by plants during their developmental process and to cope with the unfavorable changing environmental perturbations.