Transcriptional Repressor AL5 Confers Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Arabidopsis

Plant homeodomain (PHD) finger proteins affect processes of growth and development by changing transcription and reading epigenetic modifications of histones. Alfin-like PHD finger proteins only exist in plants and they usually respond to abiotic stresses.

 

Prof. CHEN Shouyi’s group and Prof. ZHANG Jinsong’s group, both from the Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, identified seven Alfin-like (AL) proteins from Arabidopsis. They found that AL proteins could bind to G-rich DNA element and mainly function to repress transcription. Using ChIP-seq assay, eight direct targets of AL5 were found. The knock-out mutants of these target genes exhibited different tolerance to stresses.

 

This work revealed the mechanism by which transcriptional repressors participate in abiotic stress tolerance and provided tools for improvement of stress tolerance in crop plants.

 

This work entitled “The Alfin-like homeodomain finger protein AL5 suppresses multiple negative factors to confer abiotic stress tolerance in Arabidopsis” was published online on Jan 25th, 2015, in Plant Journal (doi: 10.1111/tpj.12773.). Dr. WEI Wei is the first author of this paper.

 

The study was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China, National Natural Science Foundation of China, the National Transgenic Research Projects and State Key Lab of Plant Genomics.