Abstract
Plant organ growth requires the proper transition from cell proliferation to cell expansion and differentiation. The CIN-TCP transcription factor gene TCP4 and its post-transcriptional regulator microRNA319 play a pivotal role in this process. In this study, we identified a pathway in which the product of the C2H2 zinc finger gene RABBIT EARS (RBE) regulates the transcription of TCP4 during Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) petal development. RBE directly represses TCP4 during the early stages of petal development; this contributes to the role of RBE in controlling the growth of petal primordia. We also found that the rbe-1 mutant strongly enhanced the petal phenotypes of tcp4soj6 and mir319a, two mutants with compromised miR319 regulation of TCP4 Our results show that transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulation function together to pattern the spatial and temporal expression of TCP4 This in turn controls petal size and shape in Arabidopsis.
Highlights
Plant lateral organs, such as leaves and flowers, initiate on the flanks of the shoot apical meristem as a peg-like primordium (Ha et al, 2010)
We show that RABBIT EARS (RBE), which encodes a C2H2 zinc finger transcription factor closely related to JAG, directly regulates the transcription of TCP4 during early petal development in Arabidopsis
We found that the transcript level of TCP4 is modestly but significantly elevated in the flowers of the rbe-1 mutant as compared to wild type, which is consistent with a repressive role of RBE on TCP4 expression (Fig. 1B)
Summary
Plant lateral organs, such as leaves and flowers, initiate on the flanks of the shoot apical meristem as a peg-like primordium (Ha et al, 2010). During growth by cell expansion, cells differentiate to form specific structures to allow the organ to carry out its biological functions (Breuninger and Lenhard, 2012; Powell and Lenhard, 2012). A number of genes and pathways have been characterized in the regulation of this critical step during organ growth (Powell and Lenhard, 2012) Among these regulators, a suite of genes from the TEOSINTE BRANCHED1/CYCLOIDEA/PCF (TCP) gene family play a key role (Efroni et al, 2008; Martin-Trillo and Cubas, 2010; Powell and Lenhard, 2012). TCP family members encode products that contain a basic helix–loop–helix (bHLH) TCP domain that functions in DNA-binding and
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