Abstract
Iron (Fe) is an essential micronutrient for plants since it participates in essential processes such as photosynthesis, respiration and nitrogen assimilation. Fe is an abundant element in most soils, but its availability for plants is low, especially in calcareous soils. Fe deficiency causes Fe chlorosis, which can affect the productivity of the affected crops. Plants favor Fe acquisition by developing morphological and physiological responses in their roots. Ethylene (ET) and nitric oxide (NO) have been involved in the induction of Fe deficiency responses in dicot (Strategy I) plants, such as Arabidopsis. In this work, we have conducted a comparative study on the development of subapical root hairs, of the expression of the main Fe acquisition genes FRO2 and IRT1, and of the master transcription factor FIT, in two Arabidopsis thaliana ET insensitive mutants, ein2-1 and ein2-5, affected in EIN2, a critical component of the ET transduction pathway. The results obtained show that both mutants do not induce subapical root hairs either under Fe deficiency or upon treatments with the ET precursor 1-aminocyclopropane-1-carboxylate (ACC) and the NO donor S-nitrosoglutathione (GSNO). By contrast, both of them upregulate the Fe acquisition genes FRO2 and IRT1 (and FIT) under Fe deficiency. However, the upregulation was different when the mutants were exposed to ET [ACC and cobalt (Co), an ET synthesis inhibitor] and GSNO treatments. All these results clearly support the participation of ET and NO, through EIN2, in the regulation of subapical root hairs and Fe acquisition genes. The results will be discussed, taking into account the role of both ET and NO in the regulation of Fe deficiency responses.
Highlights
Iron (Fe) is very abundant in most soils, mainly as Fe3+, its availability to plants is low, especially in calcareous soils [1,2,3]
The results obtained in this work show that both Arabidopsis ET insensitive mutants, ein2-1 and ein2-5, are able to respond to Fe deficiency by inducing some physiological responses, such as ferric reductase activity (FRA) enhancement and FRO2, IRT1 and FIT upregulation (Figures 2 and 3), which agrees with previous results obtained with the ein2-1 mutant [27,42]
The results do support the existence of additional routes for ET signaling besides the linear canonical one including EIN2 (Figure 1) [7,30,32,41]
Summary
Iron (Fe) is very abundant in most soils, mainly as Fe3+ , its availability to plants is low, especially in calcareous soils [1,2,3]. Dicot (Strategy I) plants, such as Arabidopsis, need to reduce Fe3+ to Fe2+. By means of a plasma membrane ferric reductase, encoded by the FRO2 gene, prior to its root absorption through a Fe2+ transporter, encoded by the IRT1 gene [4,6,7]. When grown under Fe deficiency, dicot plants induce several physiological and morphological responses (mainly in their roots) aimed at facilitating the mobilization and acquisition of this nutrient [4,6,7]. Dicot plants enhance both ferric reductase activity (FRA; due to increased expression of AtFRO2-like genes) and Fe2+
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