Involvement of co-repressor LUH and the adapter proteins SLK1 and SLK2 in the regulation of abiotic stress response genes in Arabidopsis

BMC Plant Biology

Research Article

Vaniyambadi V Sridhar¹  Bhuwan Guragain¹  Barsha Shrestha¹ 

[1] Department of Biological Sciences, University of New Orleans, 70148, New Orleans, LA, USA;

关键词: Arabidopsis;    Co-repressor;    LUH;    SLK1;    SLK2;    Abiotic stress;    Histone deacetylase;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2229-14-54

 received in 2013-11-18, accepted in 2014-02-06,  发布年份 2014

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundDuring abiotic stress many genes that are important for growth and adaptation to stress are expressed at elevated levels. However, the mechanisms that keep the stress responsive genes from expressing under non stress conditions remain elusive. Recent genetic characterization of the co-repressor LEUNIG_HOMOLOG (LUH) and transcriptional adaptor proteins SEUSS-LIKE1 (SLK1) and SLK2 have been proposed to function redundantly in diverse developmental processes; however their function in the abiotic stress response is unknown. Moreover, the molecular functions of LUH, SLK1 and SLK2 remain obscure. Here, we show the molecular function of LUH, SLK1 and SLK2 and the role of this complex in the abiotic stress response.ResultsThe luh, slk1 and slk2 mutant plants shows enhanced tolerance to salt and osmotic stress conditions. SLK1 and SLK2 interact physically with the LUFS domain in LUH forming SLK1-LUH and SLK2-LUH co-repressor complexes to inhibit the transcription. LUH has repressor activity, whereas SLK1 and SLK2 function as adaptors to recruit LUH, which in turn recruits histone deacetylase to the target sequences to repress transcription. The stress response genes RD20, MYB2 and NAC019 are expressed at elevated levels in the luh, slk1 and slk2 mutant plants. Furthermore, these stress response genes are associated with decreased nucleosome density and increased acetylation levels at H3K9 and H3K14 in the luh, slk1 and slk2 mutant plants.ConclusionsOur results indicate that SLK1, SLK2 and LUH form a co-repressor complex. LUH represses by means of an epigenetic process involving histone modification to facilitate the condensation of chromatin thus preventing transcription at the target genes.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Shrestha et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.