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The tomato fer gene encoding a bHLH protein controls iron-uptake responses in roots.

ABSTRACT: Iron deficiency is among the most common nutritional disorders in plants. To cope with low iron supply, plants with the exception of the Gramineae increase the solubility and uptake of iron by inducing physiological and developmental alterations including iron reduction, soil acidification, Fe(II) transport and root-hair proliferation (strategy I). The chlorotic tomato fer mutant fails to activate the strategy I. It was shown previously that the fer gene is required in the root. Here, we show that fer plants exhibit root developmental phenotypes after low and sufficient iron nutrition indicating that FER acts irrespective of iron supply. Mutant fer roots displayed lower Leirt1 expression than wild-type roots. We isolated the fer gene by map-based cloning and demonstrate that it encodes a protein containing a basic helix-loop-helix domain. fer is expressed in a cell-specific pattern at the root tip independently from iron supply. Our results suggest that FER may control root physiology and development at a transcriptional level in response to iron supply and thus may be the first identified regulator for iron nutrition in plants.

SUBMITTER: Ling HQ

PROVIDER: S-EPMC129801 | biostudies-literature | 2002 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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The tomato fer gene encoding a bHLH protein controls iron-uptake responses in roots.

Ling Hong-Qing HQ Bauer Petra P Bereczky Zsolt Z Keller Beat B Ganal Martin M

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America 20021007 21

Iron deficiency is among the most common nutritional disorders in plants. To cope with low iron supply, plants with the exception of the Gramineae increase the solubility and uptake of iron by inducing physiological and developmental alterations including iron reduction, soil acidification, Fe(II) transport and root-hair proliferation (strategy I). The chlorotic tomato fer mutant fails to activate the strategy I. It was shown previously that the fer gene is required in the root. Here, we show th ...[more]

PMID: 12370409

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Project description:Iron is an essential micronutrient for all organisms and its uptake, translocation, distribution and utilization are regulated in a complex manner in plants. FER, isolated from tomato (Solanum lycopersicum), was the first transcription factor involved in the iron homeostasis of higher plants to be identified. A FER defect in the T3238fer mutant drastically downregulates the expression of iron uptake genes, such as ferric-chelate reductase 1 (LeFRO1) and iron-regulated transporter 1 (LeIRT1); however, the molecular mechanism by which FER regulates genes downstream remains unknown. The aim of this work was therefore to identify the gene that interacts with FER to regulate the iron-deficiency response in tomato.The homologue of the Arabidopsis Ib subgroup of the basic helix-loop-helix (bHLH) proteins, SlbHLH068, was identified by using the program BLASTP against the AtbHLH39 amino acid sequence in the tomato genome. The interaction between SlbHLH068 and FER was detected using yeast two-hybrid and bimolecular fluorescence complementation (BiFC) assays. In addition, virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS) was used to generate tomato plants in which SlbHLH068 expression was downregulated. The expression of genes was analysed using northern blot hybridization and multiple RT-PCR analysis. Seedlings of wild-type and mutant plants were grown under conditions of different nutrient deficiency.SlbHLH068 is highly upregulated in roots, leaves and stems in response to iron deficiency. An interaction between SlbHLH068 and FER was demonstrated using yeast two-hybrid and BiFC assays. The heterodimer formed by FER with SlbHLH068 directly bound to the promoter of LeFRO1 and activated the expression of its reporter gene in the yeast assay. The downregulation of SlbHLH068 expression by VIGS resulted in a reduction of LeFRO1 and LeIRT1 expression and iron accumulation in leaves and roots.The results indicate that SlbHLH068, as a putative transcription factor, is involved in iron homeostasis in tomato via an interaction with FER.

Project description:BACKGROUND:The basic helix-loop-helix (bHLH) proteins are a large superfamily of transcription factors, and play a central role in a wide range of metabolic, physiological, and developmental processes in higher organisms. Tomato is an important vegetable crop, and its genome sequence has been published recently. However, the bHLH gene family of tomato has not been systematically identified and characterized yet. RESULTS:In this study, we identified 159 bHLH protein-encoding genes (SlbHLH) in tomato genome and analyzed their structures. Although bHLH domains were conserved among the bHLH proteins between tomato and Arabidopsis, the intron sequences and distribution of tomato bHLH genes were extremely different compared with Arabidopsis. The gene duplication analysis showed that 58.5% and 6.3% of SlbHLH genes belonged to low-stringency and high-stringency duplication, respectively, indicating that the SlbHLH genes are mainly generated via short low-stringency region duplication in tomato. Subsequently, we classified the SlbHLH genes into 21 subfamilies by phylogenetic tree analysis, and predicted their possible functions by comparison with their homologous genes of Arabidopsis. Moreover, the expression profile analysis of SlbHLH genes from 10 different tissues showed that 21 SlbHLH genes exhibited tissue-specific expression. Further, we identified that 11 SlbHLH genes were associated with fruit development and ripening (eight of them associated with young fruit development and three with fruit ripening). The evolutionary analysis revealed that 92% SlbHLH genes might be evolved from ancestor(s) originated from early land plant, and 8% from algae. CONCLUSIONS:In this work, we systematically identified SlbHLHs by analyzing the tomato genome sequence using a set of bioinformatics approaches, and characterized their chromosomal distribution, gene structures, duplication, phylogenetic relationship and expression profiles, as well predicted their possible biological functions via comparative analysis with bHLHs of Arabidopsis. The results and information provide a good basis for further investigation of the biological functions and evolution of tomato bHLH genes.

Dataset Information

The tomato fer gene encoding a bHLH protein controls iron-uptake responses in roots.

Publications

The tomato fer gene encoding a bHLH protein controls iron-uptake responses in roots.

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