Guoli Deng, Haiqing Sun, Yulan Hu, Yaru Yang, Ping Li, Yilin Chen, Ying Zhu, Yun Zhou, Jinling Huang, Steven J Neill, Xiangyang Hu
The New phytologist 2023 AprThe phytohormones abscisic acid (ABA) and gibberellic acid (GA) antagonistically control the shift between seed dormancy and its alleviation. DELAY OF GERMINATION1 (DOG1) is a critical regulator that determines the intensity of primary seed dormancy, but its underlying regulatory mechanism is unclear. In this study, we combined physiological, biochemical, and genetic approaches to reveal that a bHLH transcriptional factor WRKY36 progressively silenced DOG1 expression to break seed dormancy through ABI5-BINDING PROTEIN 2 (AFP2) as the negative regulator of ABA signal. AFP2 interacted with WRKY36, which recognizes the W-BOX in the DOG1 promoter to suppress its expression; Overexpressing WRKY36 broke primary seed dormancy, whereas wrky36 mutants showed strong primary seed dormancy. In addition, AFP2 recruited the transcriptional corepressor TOPLESS-RELATED PROTEIN2 (TPR2) to reduce histone acetylation at the DOG1 locus, ultimately mediating WRKY36-dependent inhibition of DOG1 expression to break primary seed dormancy. Our result proposes that the WRKY36-AFP2-TPR2 module progressively silences DOG1 expression epigenetically, thereby fine-tuning primary seed dormancy. © 2023 The Authors. New Phytologist © 2023 New Phytologist Foundation.
Guoli Deng, Haiqing Sun, Yulan Hu, Yaru Yang, Ping Li, Yilin Chen, Ying Zhu, Yun Zhou, Jinling Huang, Steven J Neill, Xiangyang Hu. A transcription factor WRKY36 interacts with AFP2 to break primary seed dormancy by progressively silencing DOG1 in Arabidopsis. The New phytologist. 2023 Apr;238(2):688-704
PMID: 36653950
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