Characterization of tomato Cycling Dof Factors reveals conserved and new functions in the control of flowering time and abiotic stress responses

Abstract

DNA binding with One Finger (DOF) transcription factors are involved in multiple aspects of plant growth and development but their precise roles in abiotic stress tolerance are largely unknown. Here we report a group of five tomato DOF genes, homologous to Arabidopsis Cycling DOF Factors (CDFs), that function as transcriptional regulators involved in responses to drought and salt stress and flowering-time control in a gene-specific manner. SlCDF1-5 are nuclear proteins that display specific binding with different affinities to canonical DNA target sequences and present diverse transcriptional activation capacities in vivo. SlCDF1-5 genes exhibited distinct diurnal expression patterns and were differentially induced in response to osmotic, salt, heat, and low-temperature stresses. Arabidopsis plants overexpressing SlCDF1 or SlCDF3 showed increased drought and salt tolerance. In addition, the expression of various stress-responsive genes, such as COR15, RD29A, and RD10, were differentially activated in the overexpressing lines. Interestingly, overexpression in Arabidopsis of SlCDF3 but not SlCDF1 promotes late flowering through modulation of the expression of flowering control genes such as CO and FT. Overall, our data connect SlCDFs to undescribed functions related to abiotic stress tolerance and flowering time through the regulation of specific target genes and an increase in particular metabolites.

Genome-Wide Identification and Characterization of the <i>Dof</i> Transcription Factor Gene Family in <i>Phaseolus vulgaris</i> L.

“…Identification of each of these motifs is also illustrated in Figure 2, in which motif 1 is represented by the Dof domain that is uniformly found in all bean protein sequences ( Table 3). The motifs 12,16,19,20,23,24, and 25 were observed in subclass A; motifs 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8, 12, 14, 15, 22, 23, and 24, were observed in subclass B1, which contained the highest number of motifs; motifs 7, 12, 16, 19, 20, 23, and 24 were observed in subclass B2; motifs 4,10,15,17,18,21, and 23 were observed in subclass C1; motifs 4, 9, 10, 11, 13, 18, 19, and 25 were observed in subclass C2; and the subclasses D1 and D2 contained two motifs each, consisting of 5 and 21 and 8 and 9, respectively. From these results, it can be seen that the majority of the members …”

“…Dof TFs are involved in several important functions [18], such as root light signaling [19], germination [20], regulation of stomatal development [21], development of the vascular system [22], and responses to biotic [23] and abiotic [24] [25] stress. As such, identification and classification of the Dof family in common beans is useful for future research on plant gene expression, as to date no study has been performed on identifying members of the Dof family in common bean.…”

Genome-wide analysis and expression profiling of DNA-binding with one zinc finger (Dof) transcription factor family in potato

“…Dof TFs also play important roles in the regulation of secondary metabolic processes, such as biosynthesis of glucosinolates and flavonoids (Skirycz et al, 2006(Skirycz et al, , 2007, and cell cycle regulation (Skirycz et al, 2008). Dof TFs were also reported to be associated with various physiological processes, such as the formation of inter-fascicular cambium and vascular development (Konishi and Yanagisawa, 2007;Guo et al, 2009;Gardiner et al, 2010), regulation of leaf axial patterning (Kim et al, 2010), flower abscission (Wei et al, 2010), guard cell differentiation (Negi et al, 2013), photoperiodic flowering (Fornara et al, 2009), circadian clock (Iwamoto et al, 2009;Yang et al, 2011), plant hormonal signaling (Yanagisawa, 2002(Yanagisawa, , 2004Moreno-Risueno et al, 2007b), and biotic and abiotic stress tolerance of plants (Corrales et al, 2014;Ma et al, 2015;Sasaki et al, 2015).…”

Brassica napus Cycling Dof Factor1 (BnCDF1) is involved in flowering time and freezing tolerance

“…The BnCDF1 gene was selected for further characterisation because it responded to cold treatment and encoded protein with similarities to Arabidopsis CDF1 (Corrales et al 2014). We generated transgenic Arabidopsis plants that overexpressed BnCDF1 under the control of the CaMV 35S promoter, and three high expression BnCDF1-homozygous lines were identified.…”