Oral Presentation 45th Lorne Genome Conference 2024

Fast-forward genetics identifies genes and mechanisms of chromatin remodelling in plants (#23)

Sourav Mukherjee 1 , Avilash Singh Yadav 1 , Nikita Bungay 1 , Amy Smith 1 , Craig Dent 1 , Rucha Sarwade 1 , Yalong Guo 2 , Partha Das 1 , Sridevi Sureshkumar 1 , Sureshkumar Balasubramanian 1
  1. Monash University, Clayton, VIC, Australia
  2. State Key Laboratory of Systemic and Evolutionary Botany, Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China

Plants are very sensitive to temperature, even a change of 1℃ in temperature can affect plant growth, development and seed set. The effect of temperature on plant morphology is known as thermomorphogenesis and several genes associated with thermal response have been identified in Arabidopsis thaliana. Previously, it has been shown that POWERDRESS (PWR), a SANT-domain protein, is important for thermomorphogenesis in A. thaliana. Consistent with the idea that SANT-domain involved in interacting with histone tails and histone modifying enzymes, PWR-mediated histone deacetylation is essential for temperature-induced expression of genes such as PIF4 and YUC8. On the other hand, eviction/incorporation dynamics of the histone variant H2A.Z is also associated with thermal response at the transcriptional level. RNA-seq analysis revealed a significant overlap between pwr DEGs and another list of genes where the gene bodies are associated with high H2A.Z. These outcomes lead to the question whether two distinct histone marks – H3 acetylation/deacetylation and H2A.Z nucleosomal dynamics influencing each other or not, and how the gene expression is regulated in A. thaliana. We present some of our recent findings on this question using genome-wide chromatin profiling and genetic suppressor analysis of pwr. We isolated several suppressors of pwr linked with histone acetylation/deacetylation, translational regulation and light/temperature signalling components. Our findings are expected to provide a better understanding about gene regulation in thermal responses in A. thaliana.