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WRKY1 regulates stomatal movement in drought-stressed Arabidopsis thaliana

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Abstract

A key response of plants to moisture stress is stomatal closure, a process mediated by the phytohormone abscisic acid (ABA). Closure is affected by changes in the turgor of the stomatal guard cell. The transcription factor WRKY1 is a part of the regulatory machinery underlying stomatal movements, and through this, in the plant’s response to drought stress. The loss-of-function T-DNA insertion mutant wrky1 was particularly sensitive to ABA, with respect to both ion channel regulation and stomatal movements, and less sensitive to drought than the wild type. Complementation of the wrky1 mutant resulted in the recovery of the wild type phenotype. The WRKY1 product localized to the nucleus, and was shown able to bind to the W-box domain in the promoters of MYB2, ABCG40, DREB1A and ABI5, and thereby to control their transcription in response to drought stress or ABA treatment. WRKY1 is thought to act as a negative regulator in guard cell ABA signalling.

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Acknowledgments

This research was financially supported by thethe key special project “Breeding and Cultivation of Novel GM varieties” (2014ZX08009-022B), National Natural Science Foundations of China (31170236 and 31271506), Program for New Century Excellent Talents in University (NCET-13-0354) and the Shandong Science Fund for Distinguished Young Scholars (2014JQE27047). The wrky1 T-DNA insertion mutant (Salk_016954) was got from Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center (ABRC).

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    1. Key Laboratory of Plant Cell Engineering and Germplasm Innovation, Ministry of Education, School of Life Science, Shandong University, Jinan, 250100, China

      Zhu Qiao, Chun-Long Li & Wei Zhang

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    1. Zhu Qiao
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    2. Chun-Long Li
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    3. Wei Zhang
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    Correspondence to Wei Zhang.

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    Zhu Qiao and Chun-Long Li have contributed equally to this work.

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    Qiao, Z., Li, CL. & Zhang, W. WRKY1 regulates stomatal movement in drought-stressed Arabidopsis thaliana . Plant Mol Biol 91, 53–65 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11103-016-0441-3

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