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Expression of the high light-inducible Dunaliella LIP promoter in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii

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Abstract

The development of highly inducible promoters is critical for designing effective transformation systems for transgenic analyses. In this study, we investigated the promoter of the light-inducible protein gene (LIP) of the marine alga Dunaliella sp. LIPs are homologs of the early light-induced proteins (ELIPs) of Arabidopsis thaliana. DNA sequence analysis revealed that the LIP promoter contains several light-responsive motifs. Constructs containing progressive truncations of the LIP promoter fused with a Renilla luciferase gene were introduced into Chlamydomonas reinhardtii to identify the light-responsive region in the promoter. Transcription from the LIP promoter was stimulated by high light (HL) in a light intensity-dependent manner. In contrast, oxidative stress induced by chemicals had little effect on the LIP promoter, which implies that the LIP promoter is exclusively induced by high light. Truncation of the promoter to a −100 base pair (bp) region abrogated light inducibility, which suggests the presence of a negative cis-regulatory element upstream of the −100 bp fragment. The LIP promoter can be utilized in transgenic research to specifically select and propagate transgenic microalgae under high-light conditions.

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Acknowledgments

This work was supported by a Korea CCS R&D Center (KCRC) grant funded by the Korean government (Ministry of Science, ICT & Future Planning) (No. 2011-0031999).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Life Science, Hanyang University, Seoul, South Korea

    Seunghye Park, Yew Lee & EonSeon Jin

  2. Department of Botany, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada

    Jae-Hyeok Lee

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  1. Seunghye Park
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  2. Yew Lee
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  3. Jae-Hyeok Lee
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Correspondence to EonSeon Jin.

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S. Park and Y. Lee contributed equally to the paper.

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Park, S., Lee, Y., Lee, JH. et al. Expression of the high light-inducible Dunaliella LIP promoter in Chlamydomonas reinhardtii . Planta 238, 1147–1156 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00425-013-1955-4

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