In the 1970's, an unconventional stressful photodynamic treatment applied to plants was investigated in two directions. Exogenous photosensitizer treatment underlies direct photodynamic stress while treatment mediating endogenous photosensitizer over-accumulation pinpoints indirect photodynamic stress. For indirect photodynamic treatment, tetrapyrrole biosynthesis pathway was deregulated by 5-aminolevulenic acid or diphenyl ether. Overall, photodynamic stress involves the generation of high amount of reactive oxygen species leading to plant cell death. All these investigations were mainly performed to gain insight into new herbicide development but they were rapidly given up or limited due to the harmfulness of diphenyl ether and the high cost of 5-aminolevulinic acid treatment. Twenty years ago, plant photodynamic stress came back by way of crop transgenesis where for example protoporphyrin oxidases from human or bacteria were overexpressed. Such plants grew without dramatic effects of photodamage suggesting that plants tolerated induced photodynamic stress. In this review, we shed light on the occurrence of plant photodynamic stress and discuss challenging issues in the context of agriculture focusing on direct photodynamic modality. Indeed, we highlighted applications of exogenous PS especially porphyrins on plants, to further develop an emerged antimicrobial photodynamic treatment that could be a new strategy to kill plant pathogens without disturbing plant growth.
Keywords: 5-aminolevulinic acid; diphenyl ether herbicides; photosensitizers; plant photodynamic stress; porphyrins; tetrapyrroles.