Enhanced Tolerance to Environmental Stress in Transgenic Plants Expressing the Transcriptional Coactivator Multiprotein Bridging Factor 1c

Abstract

(J.S., V.S.)Abiotic stresses cause extensive losses to agricultural production worldwide. Acclimation of plants to abiotic conditions such as drought, salinity, or heat is mediated by a complex network of transcription factors and other regulatory genes that control multiple defense enzymes, proteins, and pathways. Associated with the activity of different transcription factors are transcriptional coactivators that enhance their binding to the basal transcription machinery. Although the importance of stressresponse transcription factors was demonstrated in transgenic plants, little is known about the function of transcriptional coactivators associated with abiotic stresses. Here, we report that constitutive expression of the stress-response transcriptional coactivator multiprotein bridging factor 1c (MBF1c) in Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) enhances the tolerance of transgenic plants to bacterial infection, heat, and osmotic stress. Moreover, the enhanced tolerance of transgenic plants to osmotic and heat stress was maintained even when these two stresses were combined. The expression of MBF1c in transgenic plants augmented the accumulation of a number of defense transcripts in response to heat stress. Transcriptome profiling and inhibitor studies suggest that MBF1c expression enhances the tolerance of transgenic plants to heat and osmotic stress by partially activating, or perturbing, the ethylene-response signal transduction pathway. Present findings suggest that MBF1 proteins could be used to enhance the tolerance of plants to different abiotic stresses.

Modulation of Ethylene Responses Affects Plant Salt-Stress Responses

“…A CTR1-like protein kinase gene was also induced by salt stress (Shiozaki et al, 2005). The ein2-1 mutant has been found to be sensitive to heat stress and osmotic stress (Suzuki et al, 2005). Other His kinase genes may function as osmosensors in cyanobacterium, yeast, and Arabidopsis (Urao et al, 1999;Marin et al, 2003;Reiser et al, 2003).…”

A viral resistance gene from common bean functions across plant families and is up-regulated in a non-virus-specific manner

“…A similar finding came from BDMV infection studies performed in RT4-4 transgenic N. benthamiana. This was not totally unexpected, because it has been established that various factors, such as SA treatment, pathogen challenge, or constitutive expression of transcriptional coactivator binding factor 1c, can nonspecifically activate expression of R genes (23)(24)(25). Systemic acquired resistance is another example of how a single pathogen can induce broadspectrum activation of defense pathways (26).…”

The responding relationship between plants and environment is the essential principle for agricultural sustainable development on the globe

“…Water is one of key factors influencing plant production, and many reports have proved this clearly. Loss of water in soil environment will lead to great reduction in crop production, which has been reflected by the total grain yield of many countries in the world [25,[30][31][32][33][34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41]. Water is the important material for photosynthetic reactions that plants depend on to finish accumulation of photosynthetic products, which are impacted greatly by physiological pathways and environmental factors (such as soil water and mineral element supply).…”

“…Plant production realization is obtained eventually through physiological pathways at least at the level of the individual and the community [34][35][36][37][38][39]. One molecule, one kind of tissue or an organ cannot produce any economic yield in terms of need for human beings [40][41][42][43][44][45]47].…”

“…These mechanisms are involved in many aspects of anatomy, physiology, biochemistry, genetics, development, evolution, and molecular biology, in which the adaptive machinery related to molecular biology, is the most important . The elucidation of it will extremely and purposefully promote the sustainable utilization of plant resources and make the best use of its current potential at different scales [27,28,[34][35][36][37][38][39][40][41][42][43]. This molecular mechanism at least includes environmental signal recognition (input), signal transduction (many cascade biochemical reactions are involved in this process), signal output, signal responses and phenotype realization, which is a multi-dimension network system and contains many levels of gene expression and regulation [43][44][45][46][47][48][49][50][51][52][53].…”