The antifungal plant defensin AhPDF1.1b is a beneficial factor involved in adaptive response to zinc overload when it is expressed in yeast cells.

Antimicrobial peptides represent an expanding family of peptides involved in innate immunity of many living organisms. They show an amazing diversity in their sequence, structure, and mechanism of action. Among them, plant defensins are renowned for their antifungal activity but various side activities have also been described. Usually, a new biological role is reported along with the discovery of a new defensin and it is thus not clear if this multifunctionality exists at the family level or at the peptide level. We previously showed that the plant defensin AhPDF1.1b exhibits an unexpected role by conferring zinc tolerance to yeast and plant cells. In this paper, we further explored this activity using different yeast genetic backgrounds: especially the zrc1 mutant and an UPRE-GFP reporter yeast strain. We showed that AhPDF1.1b interferes with adaptive cell response in the endoplasmic reticulum to confer cellular zinc tolerance. We thus highlighted that, depending on its cellular localization, AhPDF1.1b exerts quite separate activities: when it is applied exogenously, it is a toxin against fungal and also root cells, but when it is expressed in yeast cells, it is a peptide that modulates the cellular adaptive response to zinc overload.