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TAF15b, involved in the autonomous pathway for flowering, represses transcription of FLOWERING LOCUS C
Author(s) -
Eom Hyunjoo,
Park Su Jung,
Kim Min Kyung,
Kim Hoyeun,
Kang Hunseung,
Lee Ilha
Publication year - 2018
Publication title -
the plant journal
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 3.058
H-Index - 269
eISSN - 1365-313X
pISSN - 0960-7412
DOI - 10.1111/tpj.13758
Subject(s) - flowering locus c , chromatin immunoprecipitation , biology , arabidopsis , rna polymerase ii , repressor , mutant , gene , chromatin , locus (genetics) , transcription (linguistics) , genetics , transcription factor ii d , vernalization , transcription factor , promoter , microbiology and biotechnology , gene expression , linguistics , philosophy
Summary TATA ‐binding protein‐associated factors ( TAF s) are general transcription factors within the transcription factor IID (TFIID) complex, which recognizes the core promoter of genes. In addition to their biochemical function, it is known that several TAF s are involved in the regulation of developmental processes. In this study, we found that TAF 15b affects flowering time, especially through the autonomous pathway ( AP ) in Arabidopsis. The mutant taf15b shows late flowering compared with the wild type plant during both long and short days, and vernalization accelerates the flowering time of taf15b . In addition, taf15b shows strong upregulation of FLOWERING LOCUS C ( FLC ), a flowering repressor in Arabidopsis, and the flc taf15b double mutant completely offsets the late flowering of taf15b , indicating that TAF 15b is a typical AP gene. The taf15b mutant also shows increased transcript levels of COOLAIR , an antisense transcript of FLC . Consistently, chromatin immunoprecipitation (Ch IP ) analyses showed that the TAF 15b protein is enriched around both sense and antisense transcription start sites of the FLC locus. In addition, co‐immunoprecipitation showed that TAF 15b interacts with RNA polymerase II (Pol II ), while Ch IP showed increased enrichment of the phosphorylated forms, both serine 2 (Ser2) and Ser5, of the C‐terminal domain of Pol II at the FLC locus, which is indicative of transcriptional elongation. Finally, taf15b showed higher enrichment of the active histone marker, H3K4me3, on FLC chromatin. Taken together, our results suggest that TAF 15b affects flowering time through transcriptional repression of FLC in Arabidopsis.