Michigan State University (MSU) researchers have discovered a gene that helps regulate the heat stress response in plants, a discovery that could allow for the creation of crop varieties that will flourish in warmer, drier climates.
The bZIP28 gene helps regulate heat stress response in Arabidopsis thaliana, which is a member of the mustard family that’s used as a model plant for genetic studies.
"We also found that bZIP28 was responding to signals from the endoplasmic reticulum (ER), which is the first time the ER has been shown to be involved with the response to heat," says Robert Larkin, MSU assistant professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and corresponding author of the paper. "We're finding that heat tolerance is a more complex process than was first thought."
The researchers had been looking for genes tied to cell membranes that turn other genes on and off. These membrane-tethered gene switches are seen in animals, but hadn't been studied in great detail in plants.
"The bZIP28 protein is anchored in the endoplasmic reticulum, away from its place of action," says Christoph Benning, MSU professor of biochemistry and molecular biology and a member of the research team. "But when the plant is stressed by heat, one end of bZIP28 is cut off and moves into the nucleus of the cell where it can turn on other genes to control the heat response. Understanding how the whole mechanism works will be the subject of more research."
Plants with an inactive bZIP28 gene die as soon as temperatures reach a certain level, but the research could help create plants that would flourish in warmer temperatures.
The research was presented in the Oct. 6 issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
Source: MSU
Ivy Hughes, development news editor, can be reached here.
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