Project description:Plants grow continuously and undergo numerous changes in their vegetative morphology and physiology during their life span. The molecular basis of these changes is largely unknown. To provide a more comprehensive picture of shoot development in Arabidopsis, microarray analysis was used to profile the mRNA content of shoot apices of different ages, as well as leaf primordia and fully-expanded leaves from 6 different positions on the shoot, in early-flowering and late-flowering genotypes. This extensive dataset provides a new and unexpectedly complex picture of shoot development in Arabidopsis. At any given time, the pattern of gene expression is different in every leaf on the shoot, and reflects the activity at least 6 developmental programs. Three of these are specific to individual leaves (leaf maturation, leaf aging, leaf senescence), two occur at the level of the shoot apex (vegetative phase change, floral induction), and one involves the entire shoot (shoot aging). Our results demonstrate that vegetative development is a much more dynamic process that previously imagined, and provide new insights into the underlying mechanism of this process.
Project description:Leaf senescence is an essential developmental process that involves altered regulation of thousands of genes and changes in many metabolic and signaling pathways resulting in massive physiological and structural changes in the leaf. The regulation of senescence is complex and although several senescence regulatory genes have been identified and characterized there is little information on how these individual regulators function globally in the control of the process. In this paper we use microarray analysis to obtain a high-resolution time course profile of gene expression during development of a single leaf over a three week period from just before full expansion to senescence. The multiple time points enable the use of highly informative clustering tools to reveal distinct time points at which signaling and metabolic pathways change during senescence. Analysis of motif enrichment in co-regulated gene clusters identifies clear groups of transcription factors active at different stages of leaf development and senescence.
Project description:Leaf senescence is the final developmental process that includes the mobilization of nutrients from old leaves to newly growing tissues. The progression of leaf senescence requires dynamic but coordinated changes of gene expression. Although several transcription factors (TFs) are known to be involved in both negative and positive modes of regulation of leaf senescence, detailed mechanisms that underlie the progression of leaf senescence are largely unknown. We report here that the class II ERF transcriptional repressors are controlled by proteasome and regulate the progression of leaf senescence in Arabidopsis. Since we had previously demonstrated that NtERF3, a model of tobacco class II ERFs, specifically interacts with a ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme, we examined the stability of NtERF3 and found that bacterially produced NtERF3 was rapidly degraded by plant protein extracts in vitro. Whereas NtERF3 accumulation was low in plants, it was increased by treatment with a proteasome inhibitor. Arabidopsis class II ERFs, namely, AtERF4 and AtERF8, were also controlled by proteasome and stabilized by aging of plants. The transgenic plants in which NtERF3, AtERF4, and AtERF8 were individually expressed under the control of the 35S promoter exhibited the precocious leaf senescence. Our microarray and RT-PCR analyses revealed that AtERF4 regulated expression of genes involving in various stress responses and leaf senescence. In contrast, aterf4 aterf8 mutant exhibited delayed leaf senescence. Taken together, we present the important role of class II ERFs in the regulation of leaf senescence.
Project description:Leaf senescence is the final developmental process that includes the mobilization of nutrients from old leaves to newly growing tissues. The progression of leaf senescence requires dynamic but coordinated changes of gene expression. Although several transcription factors (TFs) are known to be involved in both negative and positive modes of regulation of leaf senescence, detailed mechanisms that underlie the progression of leaf senescence are largely unknown. We report here that the class II ERF transcriptional repressors are controlled by proteasome and regulate the progression of leaf senescence in Arabidopsis. Since we had previously demonstrated that NtERF3, a model of tobacco class II ERFs, specifically interacts with a ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme, we examined the stability of NtERF3 and found that bacterially produced NtERF3 was rapidly degraded by plant protein extracts in vitro. Whereas NtERF3 accumulation was low in plants, it was increased by treatment with a proteasome inhibitor. Arabidopsis class II ERFs, namely, AtERF4 and AtERF8, were also controlled by proteasome and stabilized by aging of plants. The transgenic plants in which NtERF3, AtERF4, and AtERF8 were individually expressed under the control of the 35S promoter exhibited the precocious leaf senescence. Our microarray and RT-PCR analyses revealed that AtERF4 regulated expression of genes involving in various stress responses and leaf senescence. In contrast, aterf4 aterf8 mutant exhibited delayed leaf senescence. Taken together, we present the important role of class II ERFs in the regulation of leaf senescence. Transcriptomes of 35S:AtERF4-HA and 35S:NLS-GFP-HA (control) Arabidopsis two-weeks seedling were compared.
Project description:Leaf development has been monitored chiefly by following anatomical markers. Analysis of transcriptome dynamics during leaf maturation revealed multiple expression patterns that rise or fall with age or that display age specific peaks. These were used to formulate a digital differentiation index (DDI), based on a set of selected markers with informative expression during leaf ontogeny. The leaf-based DDI reliably predicted the developmental state of leaf samples from diverse sources and was independent of mitotic cell division transcripts or propensity of the specific cell type. To calibrate and test the DDI a series of Arabidopsis shoot development was used (Efroni et al, 2008)