Abstract
Nitrate is an essential macronutrient and a signal molecule that regulates the expression of multiple genes involved in plant growth and development. Here, we describe the participation of Arabidopsis DNA binding with one finger (DOF) transcription factor CDF3 in nitrate responses and shows that CDF3 gene is induced under nitrate starvation. Moreover, knockout cdf3 mutant plants exhibit nitrate-dependent lateral and primary root modifications, whereas CDF3 overexpression plants show increased biomass and enhanced root development under both nitrogen poor and rich conditions. Expression analyses of 35S::CDF3 lines reveled that CDF3 regulates the expression of an important set of nitrate responsive genes including, glutamine synthetase-1, glutamate synthase-2, nitrate reductase-1, and nitrate transporters NRT2.1, NRT2.4, and NRT2.5 as well as carbon assimilation genes like PK1 and PEPC1 in response to N availability. Consistently, metabolite profiling disclosed that the total amount of key N metabolites like glutamate, glutamine, and asparagine were higher in CDF3-overexpressing plants, but lower in cdf3-1 in N limiting conditions. Moreover, overexpression of CDF3 in tomato increased N accumulation and yield efficiency under both optimum and limiting N supply. These results highlight CDF3 as an important regulatory factor for the nitrate response, and its potential for improving N use efficiency in crops.
Highlights
Nitrogen (N) is an essential macronutrient and its availability in soil is a crucial factor for plant growth, distribution, and crop productivity
We identified a set of five DNA binding with one finger (DOF) transcription factors (TFs) from group D (CDFs) in Arabidopsis and tomato that are differentially expressed in vegetative tissues in response to diverse environmental conditions like drought, salinity, or extreme temperatures (Corrales et al, 2014, 2017)
We reported that the overexpression of AtCDF3 and SlCDF3 in both Arabidopsis and tomato, altered metabolism since several amino acids like GABA, proline, glutamine, and asparagine are accumulated among others, suggesting that CDFs might play important functions in the control of N metabolism (Corrales et al, 2017; Renau-Morata et al, 2017)
Summary
Nitrogen (N) is an essential macronutrient and its availability in soil is a crucial factor for plant growth, distribution, and crop productivity. N supply promotes changes in the expression of genes involved in abiotic stress responses, carbon (C) metabolism, regulation of C/N balance, and signaling transduction, like transcription factors (TFs), kinases, and phosphatases (Gutierrez et al, 2007). Several TFs implicated in the regulation of gene expression and signaling by NO3− have been identified so far, including NIN Like protein 7, NLP7 (Castaings et al, 2009; Alvarez et al, 2020), NLP8 (Yan et al, 2016); TGA1 and TGA4 (Alvarez et al, 2014, 2019), SPL9 (Krouk et al, 2010), LBD37, LBD38, and LBD39 (Rubin et al, 2009), bZIP1 (Obertello et al, 2010), TCP20 (Guan et al, 2014), and ANR1 (Zhang and Forde, 1998). Our understanding of the diverse regulatory pathways and the molecular mechanisms by which the different TFs modulate NO3− responses is still limited
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