Abstract
Nuclear factor Y (NF-Y) is a heterotrimeric transcription factor with three distinct NF-YA, NF-YB and NF-YC subunits. It plays important roles in plant growth, development and stress responses. We have reported earlier on development of gain-of-function mutants in an indica rice cultivar, BPT-5204. Now, we screened 927 seeds from 70 Ac/Ds plants for salinity tolerance and identified one activation-tagged salt tolerant DS plant (DS-16, T3 generation) that showed enhanced expression of a novel ‘histone-like transcription factor’ belonging to rice NF-Y subfamily C and was named as OsNF-YC13. Localization studies using GFP-fusion showed that the protein is localized to nucleus and cytoplasm. Real time expression analysis confirmed upregulation of transcript levels of OsNF-YC13 during salt treatment in a tissue specific manner. Biochemical and physiological characterization of the DS-16 revealed enhanced K+/Na+ ratio, proline content, chlorophyll content, enzymes with antioxidant activity etc. DS-16 also showed transcriptional up-regulation of genes that are involved in salinity tolerance. In-silico analysis of OsNF-YC13 promoter region evidenced the presence of various key stress-responsive cis-regulatory elements. OsNF-YC13 subunit alone does not appear to have the capacity for direct transcription activation, but appears to interact with the B- subunits in the process of transactivation.
Highlights
Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is a major staple food crop consumed globally by more than three billion people
A unique pattern of heterotrimer formation of Nuclear factor Y (NF-Y) complex happens first in cytoplasm with NF-YB and NF-YC forming a heterodimer, which subsequently translocates to the nucleus, where the dimer interacts with NF-YA subunit to form a mature NF-Y transcription factor[31, 32]
We report on the identification and characterization of a novel nuclear factor Y gene (NF-YC13) in one of the identified salt tolerant AT lines that has been shown to impart salt tolerance in rice
Summary
Rice (Oryza sativa L.) is a major staple food crop consumed globally by more than three billion people. Transcription factors (TFs) are a group of regulatory proteins that regulate the expression of genes under different environmental stress conditions[27, 28] These TFs bind to specific cis-elements in the promoter regions of stress-responsive genes and initiate complex signaling cascades in various biosysnthetic pathways including those in response to abiotic stresses[29]. Nuclear factor Y (NF-Y), known as Heme activator protein (HAP) or CCAAT binding factor (CBF) is a heterotrimeric complex transcription factor with high affinity and sequence specificity to a cis-element, CCAAT box in eukaryote promoters and has been reported to play roles in the activation of diverse genes[30]. It is binding to a specific sequence (CCAAT) in a promoter results in either positive or negative transcriptional regulation of genes under its control[33]
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