The harvest-responsive region of the Asparagus officinalis sparagine synthetase promoter reveals complexity in the regulation of the harvest response
Donald A. Hunter A B and Lyn M. Watson AA New Zealand Institute for Crop and Food Research Limited, Private Bag 11-600, Palmerston North, New Zealand.
B Corresponding author. Email: hunterd@crop.cri.nz
Functional Plant Biology 35(12) 1212-1223 https://doi.org/10.1071/FP08161
Submitted: 5 June 2008 Accepted: 15 September 2008 Published: 16 December 2008
Abstract
The activity of a 1915-bp asparagine synthetase (AS) promoter of Asparagus officinalis L. was induced in mature leaves of transgenic Arabidopsis thaliana (L.) Heynh. plants when the leaves were detached and held in water for 24 h. To understand this induction by harvest, variants of the AS promoter were linked to the β-glucuronidase GUS reporter gene. Harvest induction in the leaves required detachment and was not simply a wound response. Two regions in the AS promoter (Region A, –640 to –523; Region B, –524 to –383) were independently able to confer harvest response to the otherwise unresponsive –383AS (minimal) promoter. Region A was studied in further detail. Various truncations, deletions, or nucleotide substitutions of Region A affected activity and fold induction of the minimal promoter. However, no harvest-inducible cis-acting element within Region A was identified. Although the minimal promoter contained a dehydration-responsive element and ACGT elements similar to ABA-responsive regulatory motifs these were not needed by the upstream regulatory regions for directing harvest response. When four copies of Region A were linked to the minimal promoter it became highly active in leaves before harvest. Deletions within Region A showed that it required its complete 117 bp for driving harvest response, yet the region cannot simply be thought of as a harvest-responsive module, since its concatemerisation led to constitutive expression.
Additional keywords: senescence, wounding.
Acknowledgements
We thank David Brummell, Kevin Davies and Huaibi Zhang for careful reading of the manuscript, Somrutai Winichayakul for kindly supplying plasmid pASP3 and transgenic Arabidopsis plants containing the –1958 AS:GUS construct, and Ian King for maintaining the Arabidopsis transgenic plants. This research was financially supported by the New Zealand Foundation for Science and Technology.
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