Abstract
Wintersweet (Chimonanthus praecox) is a popular garden plant because of its flowering time, sweet fragrance, and ornamental value. However, research into the molecular mechanism that regulates flower development in wintersweet is still limited. In this study, we sought to investigate the molecular characteristics, expression patterns, and potential functions of two C3H-type zinc finger (CZF) protein genes, CpCZF1 and CpCZF2, which were isolated from the wintersweet flowers based on the flower developmental transcriptome database. CpCZF1 and CpCZF2 were more highly expressed in flower organs than in vegetative tissues, and during the flower development, their expression profiles were associated with flower primordial differentiation, especially that of petal and stamen primordial differentiation. Overexpression of either CpCZF1 or CpCZF2 caused alterations on stamens in transgenic Arabidopsis. The expression levels of the stamen identity-related genes, such as AGAMOUS (AG), PISTILLATA (PI), SEPALLATA1 (SEP1), SEPALLATA2 (SEP2), SEPALLATA3 (SEP3), APETALA1 (AP1), APETALA2 (AP2), and boundary gene RABBIT EAR (RBE) were significantly up-regulated in CpCZF1 overexpression lines. Additionally, the transcripts of AG, PI, APETALA3 SEP1-3, AP1, and RBE were markedly increased in CpCZF2 overexpressed plant inflorescences. Moreover, CpCZF1 and CpCZF2 could interact with each other by using yeast two-hybrid and bimolecular fluorescence complementation assays. Our results suggest that CpCZF1 and CpCZF2 may be involved in the regulation of stamen development and cause the formation of abnormal flowers in transgenic Arabidopsis plants.
Highlights
Flowering plants are one of the most diverse groups of organisms on earth, constituting 295,383 of the 374,000 known plant species in the wild [1]
The results show that these two C3H-type Zinc Finger genes, CpCZF1 and CpCZF2, isolated from wintersweet, may be involved in the regulation of flower organ identity in transgenic Arabidopsis
CpCZF2 (Gene bank accession number: KY435927) contains a 1056 bp open read frame (ORF), which encodes a peptide of 351 amino acid residues with a calculated molecular mass of 39.19 kDa and a theoretical isoelectric point of 8.74
Summary
Flowering plants are one of the most diverse groups of organisms on earth, constituting 295,383 of the 374,000 known plant species in the wild [1]. The genes governing flower development and organ identities have been extensively studied in various plants. The flower of Arabidopsis has four whorls of organs. The A-, B-, C-, D-, and E-function of the floral homeotic genes were found to be vital for flora primordial identity specification [2,3,4,5,6,7,8], and constitute the most regulators of the flower organ identities. C-, D-, and E-function genes code for MADS-box domain transcriptional factor proteins [10]. Members of other transcriptional factor families have been identified for their role in directly or indirectly regulating flower development. The flowering time in maize is controlled by an
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