Abstract
Messenger RNA (mRNA) turnover in eukaryotic cells begins with shortening of the poly (A) tail at the 3′ end, a process called deadenylation. In yeast, the deadenylation reaction is predominantly mediated by CCR4 and CCR4-associated factor 1 (CAF1), two components of the well-characterised protein complex named CCR4-NOT. We report here that AtCAF1a and AtCAF1b, putative Arabidopsis homologs of the yeast CAF1 gene, partially complement the growth defect of the yeast caf1 mutant in the presence of caffeine or at high temperatures. The expression of AtCAF1a and AtCAF1b is induced by multiple stress-related hormones and stimuli. Both AtCAF1a and AtCAF1b show deadenylation activity in vitro and point mutations in the predicted active sites disrupt this activity. T-DNA insertion mutants disrupting the expression of AtCAF1a and/or AtCAF1b are defective in deadenylation of stress-related mRNAs, indicating that the two AtCAF1 proteins are involved in regulated mRNA deadenylation in vivo. Interestingly, the single and double mutants of AtCAF1a and AtCAF1b show reduced expression of pathogenesis-related (PR) genes PR1 and PR2 and are more susceptible to Pseudomonas syringae pv tomato DC3000 (Pst DC3000) infection, whereas transgenic plants over-expressing AtCAF1a show elevated expression of PR1 and PR2 and increased resistance to the same pathogen. Our results suggest roles of the AtCAF1 proteins in regulated mRNA deadenylation and defence responses to pathogen infections.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Clyde L Denis (University of New Hampshire, USA) for providing the yeast strains, Jianmin Zhou (National Institute of Biological Sciences, China) for providing the bacterial strain Pseudomonas syringae pv tomato DC3000, and Akira Sakai (Mitsubishi Kasei Institute of Life Sciences, Japan) for his insightful comments on the yeast complementation assays. We are grateful to the anonymous reviewers for their valuable suggestions for this manuscript. This work was supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (30425033, 30530440), the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2006CB102004, 2006AA10A116) and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KSCX2-YW-N-045).
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Supplementary information, Figure S1
Comparison of the amino acid sequences of AtCAF1 and CAF1 proteins from Capsicum annuum (Ca), C. elegans (Ce), Drosophila melanogaster (Dm), Homo sapiens (Hs), Mus musculus (Mm), and S. cerevisiae (Sc) (only the RNase D domain is shown). (PDF 345 kb)
Supplementary information, Table S1
Oligonucleotides used in this study (PDF 50 kb)
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Liang, W., Li, C., Liu, F. et al. The Arabidopsis homologs of CCR4-associated factor 1 show mRNA deadenylation activity and play a role in plant defence responses. Cell Res 19, 307–316 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/cr.2008.317
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/cr.2008.317
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