Jasmonate (JA) is a lipid-derived plant hormone that regulates plant immunity to mechanical wounding, insect attack and pathogen infection through triggering a genome-wide transcriptional reprogramming. However, the regulatory mechanisms of JA-triggered transcriptional reprogramming remain largely unkown.
In a recent study, Scientists from Dr. LI Chuanyou’s group at the Institute of Genetics and Development Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, discovered that the tomato master regulator MYC2 orchestrates a hierarchical transcriptional program that underlies JA-mediated plant immunity.
Using chromatin immunoprecipitation sequencing coupled with RNA sequencing assays, they identified a collection of MYC2-targeted JA-responsive (MTJA) genes. Interestingly, they found that MTJAs are enriched for MYC2-targeted transcription factor (MTF) genes and early JA-responsive genes, but are not enriched for the late JA-responsive genes. These results suggested that MYC2 acts as a high-level regulator that initiates and controls the JA-elicited transcriptional cascade.
These findings reveal a scenario in which, in response to JA elicitation, MYC2 and its downstream MTFs form various MYC2–MTF transcriptional modules, which initiate and amplify specific aspects of the transcriptional output. Considering that JA occurs in virtually all plants and controls plant responses to a wide range of stresses through transcriptional regulation, it is likely that this mechanism also operates in other aspects of JA responses.
This work entitled “MYC2 Orchestrates a Hierarchical Transcriptional Cascade that Regulates Jasmonate-Mediated Plant Immunity in Tomato”, with Dr. DU Minmin and Dr. ZHAO Jiuhai as the co-first authors, has been published in
The Plant Cell (
DOI:10.1105/tpc.16.00953).
This research was supported by the National Basic Research Program of China, the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, the Ministry of Science and Technology, the Ministry of Agriculture and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.
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| MYC2 and its downstream transcription factors form a hierarchical Transcriptional cascade during JA-mediated plant immunity (Image by IGDB) |
Contact:
Dr. LI Chuanyou
