Abstract
BackgroundChloroplast plays a vital role in plant development and growth. The pentatricopeptide repeat (PPR) gene family is one of the largest gene families in plants. In addition, cold stress affects a broad spectrum of cellular components, e.g. chloroplast, and metabolism in plants. However, the regulatory mechanism for rice PPR genes on chloroplast development still remains elusive under cold stress.ResultIn this paper, we characterized a new rice PPR gene mutant tcd10 (thermo-sensitive chlorophyll-deficient mutant 10) that exhibits the albino phenotype, malformed chloroplast and could not survive after the 5-leaf stage when grown at 20 °C, but does the normal phenotype at 32 °C. Map-based cloning, followed by RNA interference and CRISPR/Cas9 genome editing techniques, revealed that TCD10 encoding a novel PPR protein, mainly localized to the chloroplasts, with 27 PPR motifs, is responsible for the mutant phenotype. In addition, TCD10 is specific expression in tissues. The disruption of TCD10 resulted in an evidently reduced expression of chloroplast-associated genes under cold stress (20 °C), whereas they did recovered to normal levels at high temperature (32 °C). These results showed an important role of TCD10 for chloroplast development under cold stress.ConclusionsThe TCD10 encodes a novel rice PPR protein, mainly located in chloroplasts, which is important for chloroplast development, growth and the maintenance of photosynthetic electron transport and its disorder would lead to an aberrant chloroplast and abnormal expressions in these genes for chloroplast development and photosynthesis in rice under cold stress.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12284-016-0134-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Chloroplast plays a vital role in plant development and growth
The TCD10 encodes a novel rice pentatricopeptide repeat (PPR) protein, mainly located in chloroplasts, which is important for chloroplast development, growth and the maintenance of photosynthetic electron transport and its disorder would lead to an aberrant chloroplast and abnormal expressions in these genes for chloroplast development and photosynthesis in rice under cold stress
The mutant seedlings displayed albino phenotype, thereafter could not survive past 5-leaf stage at 20 °C(data not shown); the degree of chlorosis gradually weakened when grown at 24 °C and 28 °C, but become green as WT plants at 32 °C, indicating the low
Summary
Chloroplast plays a vital role in plant development and growth. The pentatricopeptide repeat (PPR) gene family is one of the largest gene families in plants. Cold stress affects a broad spectrum of cellular components, e.g. chloroplast, and metabolism in plants. The regulatory mechanism for rice PPR genes on chloroplast development still remains elusive under cold stress. The formation of normal chloroplasts is crucial for photosynthesis and carbon assimilation in plants. Plastid development from proplastids to mature chloroplasts can be divided into three phases (Chory et al 1991; Mullet 1993; Kusumi et al 1997 and 2014). The first phase concerns the activation of Pentatricopeptide repeat (PPR) proteins are one of the largest protein families in plants.
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary 
Published Version (
Free)
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a call