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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Contents Vol 37(1)

The cotton dehydration-responsive element binding protein GhDBP1 contains an EAR-motif and is involved in the defense response of Arabidopsis to salinity stress

Chun-Juan Dong A , Bo Huang A and Jin-Yuan Liu A B
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations

A Laboratory of Molecular Biology and MOE Laboratory of Protein Science, Department of Biological Sciences and Biotechnology, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, China.

B Corresponding author. Email: liujy@mail.tsinghua.edu.cn

Functional Plant Biology 37(1) 64-73 https://doi.org/10.1071/FP09100
Submitted: 6 May 2009  Accepted: 8 September 2009   Published: 5 January 2010

Abstract

Our previous work reported that cotton dehydration-responsive element (DRE) binding protein 1 (GhDBP1) could function as an active transcriptional repressor for DRE-mediated gene expression. However, the repression mechanism utilised by GhDBP1 was unclear. In this report, we demonstrate that GhDBP1’s transcriptional repression domain is located at the C-terminus, and is known as an ERF-associated amphiphilic repression (EAR)-motif. Furthermore, the amino acid residues aspartic acid (D), leucine (L), asparagine (N) and proline (P) are conserved in the EAR-motif, and were found to be necessary for repression through mutational analysis. In addition, our promoter assays demonstrated a dehydration-induced and rehydration-repressed expression pattern of GhDBP1. Transgenic Arabidopsis plants overexpressing GhDBP1 were more sensitive to high salinity stress and appeared to downregulate the expression levels of the stress-induced effecter genes. Taken together, our findings provide an important insight into GhDBP1’s potential molecular repression mechanism and how it is involved in plant stress responses.

Additional keywords: DRE-binding protein, Gossypium hirsutum, high salinity, transcriptional repressor, transgenic Arabidopsis.


Acknowledgements

We thank the editors and reviewers for their critical reading and constructive suggestions. This work was supported by grants from the National Transgenic Animals and Plants Research Project (2008ZX08009–003 and 2008ZX08005–003), the State Key Basic Research and Development Plan of China (2006CB101706 and 2004CB117303) and the Hi-Tech Research and Development Program of China (Grant no. 2004AA222100, 2002AA212051 and 2002AA207006).


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