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Over-representation of repeats in stress response genes: a strategy to increase versatility under stressful conditions?

ABSTRACT: The survival of individual organisms facing stress is enhanced by the induction of a set of changes. As the intensity, duration and nature of stress is highly variable, the optimal response to stress may be unpredictable. To face such an uncertain future, it may be advantageous for a clonal population to increase its phenotypic heterogeneity (bet-hedging), ensuring that at least a subset of cells would survive the current stress. With current techniques, assessing the extent of this variability experimentally remains a challenge. Here, we use a bioinformatic approach to compare stress response genes with the rest of the genome for the presence of various kinds of repeated sequences, elements known to increase variability during the transfer of genetic information (i.e. during replication, but also during gene expression). We investigated the potential for illegitimate and homologous recombination of 296 Escherichia coli genes related to repair, recombination and physiological adaptations to different stresses. Although long repeats capable of engaging in homologous recombination are almost absent in stress response genes, we observed a significant high number of short close repeats capable of inducing phenotypic variability by slipped-mispair during DNA, RNA or protein synthesis.

SUBMITTER: Rocha EP

PROVIDER: S-EPMC113848 | biostudies-literature | 2002 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Over-representation of repeats in stress response genes: a strategy to increase versatility under stressful conditions?

Rocha Eduardo P C EP Matic Ivan I Taddei François F

Nucleic acids research 20020501 9

The survival of individual organisms facing stress is enhanced by the induction of a set of changes. As the intensity, duration and nature of stress is highly variable, the optimal response to stress may be unpredictable. To face such an uncertain future, it may be advantageous for a clonal population to increase its phenotypic heterogeneity (bet-hedging), ensuring that at least a subset of cells would survive the current stress. With current techniques, assessing the extent of this variability ...[more]

PMID: 11972324

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Project description:Growth retardation and stress-induced premature plant senescence are accompanied by a severe yield reduction and raise a major agro-economic concern. To improve biomass and yield in agricultural crops under mild stress conditions, the survival must be changed to productivity mode. Our previous successful attempts to delay premature senescence and growth inhibition under abiotic stress conditions by autoregulation of cytokinins (CKs) levels constitute a generic technology toward the development of highly productive plants. Since this technology is based on the induction of CKs synthesis during the age-dependent senescence phase by a senescence-specific promoter (SARK), which is not necessarily regulated by abiotic stress conditions, we developed autoregulating transgenic plants expressing the IPT gene specifically under abiotic stress conditions. The Arabidopsis promoter of the stress-induced metallothionein gene (AtMT) was isolated, fused to the IPT gene and transformed into tobacco plants. The MT:IPT transgenic tobacco plants displayed comparable elevated biomass productivity and maintained growth under drought conditions. To decipher the role and the molecular mechanisms of CKs in reverting the survival transcriptional program to a sustainable plant growth program, we performed gene expression analysis of candidate stress-related genes and found unexpectedly clear downregulation in the CK-overproducing plants. We also investigated kinase activity after applying exogenous CKs to tobacco cell suspensions that were grown in salinity stress. In-gel kinase activity analysis demonstrated CK-dependent deactivation of several stress-related kinases including two of the MAPK components, SIPK and WIPK and the NtOSAK, a member of SnRK2 kinase family, a key component of the ABA signaling cascade. A comprehensive phosphoproteomics analysis of tobacco cells, treated with exogenous CKs under salinity-stress conditions indicated that >50% of the identified phosphoproteins involved in stress responses were dephosphorylated by CKs. We hypothesize that upregulation of CK levels under stress conditions desensitize stress signaling cues through deactivation of kinases that are normally activated under stress conditions. CK-dependent desensitization of environmental stimuli is suggested to attenuate various pathways of the avoidance syndrome including the characteristic growth arrest and the premature senescence while allowing normal growth and metabolic maintenance.

Dataset Information

Over-representation of repeats in stress response genes: a strategy to increase versatility under stressful conditions?

Publications

Over-representation of repeats in stress response genes: a strategy to increase versatility under stressful conditions?

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