Abstract
Jasmonic acid (JA) is an important phytohormone that regulates plant defense responses against herbivore attack, pathogen infection and mechanical wounding. In this report, we provided biochemical and genetic evidence to show that the Arabidopsis thaliana NAC family proteins ANAC019 and ANAC055 might function as transcription activators to regulate JA-induced expression of defense genes. The role of the two NAC genes in JA signaling was examined with the anac019 anac055 double mutant and with transgenic plants overexpressing ANAC019 or ANAC055. The anac019 anac055 double mutant plants showed attenuated JA-induced VEGETATIVE STORAGE PROTEIN1 (VSP1) and LIPOXYGENASE2 (LOX2) expression, whereas transgenic plants overexpressing the two NAC genes showed enhanced JA-induced VSP1 and LOX2 expression. That the JA-induced expression of the two NAC genes depends on the function of COI1 and AtMYC2, together with the finding that overexpression of ANAC019 partially rescued the JA-related phenotype of the atmyc2-2 mutant, has led us to a hypothesis that the two NAC proteins act downstream of AtMYC2 to regulate JA-signaled defense responses. Further evidence to substantiate this idea comes from the observation that the response of the anac019 anac055 double mutant to a necrotrophic fungus showed high similarity to that of the atmyc2-2 mutant.
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful to Dr Xinnian Dong (Duke University, Durham, NC, USA) for critical reading of the manuscript and valuable suggestions. We thank Dr Jianmin Zhou (National Institute of Biological Sciences, Beijing, China) for providing the fungus strain Botrytis cinerea, Dr Salomé Prat (Institut de Biologia Molecular de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain) for providing homozygous atmyc2-2 (T-DNA insertion line SALK_083483) seeds and Dr Daoxin Xie (Tsinghua University, Beijing, China) for providing the coi1-1 seeds. This work was supported by grants from The National Natural Science Foundation of China (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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Bu, Q., Jiang, H., Li, CB. et al. Role of the Arabidopsis thaliana NAC transcription factors ANAC019 and ANAC055 in regulating jasmonic acid-signaled defense responses. Cell Res 18, 756–767 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1038/cr.2008.53
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/cr.2008.53
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