The Arabidopsis Gene zinc finger protein 3(ZFP3) Is Involved in Salt Stress and Osmotic Stress Response.

Aidong Zhang,Imran Ali,Yinbo Gan,Yihua Liu,Changmei Hua,An Yan,Minjie Wu,Dongdong Liu,Bohan Liu,Linli Huang,Keqiang Wu

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0168367

Abstract

Plants are continuously challenged by various abiotic and biotic stresses. To tide over these adversities, plants evolved intricate regulatory networks to adapt these unfavorable environments. So far, many researchers have clarified the molecular and genetic pathways involved in regulation of stress responses. However, the mechanism through which these regulatory networks operate is largely unknown. In this study, we cloned a C2H2-type zinc finger protein gene ZFP3 from Arabidopsis thaliana and investigated its function in salt and osmotic stress response. Our results showed that the expression level of ZFP3 was highly suppressed by NaCl, mannitol and sucrose. Constitutive expression of ZFP3 enhanced tolerance of plants to salt and osmotic stress while the zfp3 mutant plants displays reduced tolerance in Arabidopsis. Gain- and Loss-of-function studies of ZFP3 showed that ZFP3 significantly changes proline accumulation and chlorophyll content. Furthermore, over-expression of ZFP3 induced the expressions of stress-related gene KIN1, RD22, RD29B and AtP5CS1. These results suggest that ZFP3 is involved in salt and osmotic stress response.

Highlights

Plants are constantly challenged by a variety of stresses such as high salinity, extreme temperature and drought [1,2]
To comprehend the role of ZFP3 in osmotic stress, we examined the germination condition on 1/2 Murashige and Skoog (MS) medium supplemented with different concentrations of mannitol and sucrose
The germination rates were significantly lower in zfp3 mutant and significantly higher in ZFP3 overexpression lines in comparison to wild type when treated with 200 mM sucrose

Summary

Introduction

Plants are constantly challenged by a variety of stresses such as high salinity, extreme temperature and drought [1,2]. Environmental stress has been one of the major factors affecting crops yield These stresses cause huge losses in some cases is as high as 50% of the total yield of some major crops [1,3,4]. To cope with these stressful conditions, plants have evolved an intricate regulatory mechanism [5], which is mostly regulated through activation or inhibition of the expression of a series of transcription factors [5,6,7]. In the past few decades, a number of transcription factors have been found to participate in physiological responses of plants to abiotic stresses. These different transcription factors involved in abiotic stress generally belong to a large family which include C-repeat binding factors (CBFs), dehydration responsive element binding factors (DREBs), ethylene-responsive element binding factor (ERF), AP2/EREB, basic domain-leucine zipper (bZIP), NAC, MYB, MYC, WRKY and zinc finger proteins [6,7,8,9,10,11,12]

Methods

Results

Conclusion