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HY5 and ABI5 transcription factors physically interact to fine tune light and ABA signaling in Arabidopsis

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Cross-talk between light and ABA signaling is mediated by physical interaction between HY5 and ABI5 Arabidopsis.

Abstract

Plants undergo numerous transitions during their life-cycle and have developed a very complex network of signaling to integrate information from their surroundings to effectively survive in the ever-changing environment. Light signaling is one of the crucial factors that govern the plant growth and development from the very first step of that is from seedling germination to the flowering. Similarly, Abscisic acid (ABA) signaling transduces the signals from external unfavorable condition to the internal developmental pathways and is crucial for regulation of seed maturation, dormancy germination and early seedling development. These two fundamental factors coordinately regulate plant wellbeing, but the underlying molecular mechanisms that drive this regulation are poorly understood. Here, we identified that two bZIP transcription factors, ELONGATED HYPOCOTYLE 5 (HY5), a positive regulator of light signaling and ABA-INSENSITIVE 5 (ABI5), a positive regulator of ABA signaling interacts and integrates the two pathways together. Our phenotypic data suggest that ABI5 may act as a negative regulator during photomorphogenesis in contrast, HY5 acts as a positive regulator of ABA signaling in an ABA dependent manner. We further showed that over-expression of HY5 leads to ABA-hypersensitive phenotype and late flowering phenotype. Taken together, our data provides key insights regarding the mechanism of interaction between ABI5-HY5 that fine tunes the stress and developmental response in Arabidopsis.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Dr. Prabodh Kumar Trivedi and Dr. Chitra Bhatia for kindly providing the hy5-215 and OE-HY5 transgenic seeds. We would like to thank NIPGR confocal imaging facility, DNA sequencing facility and radioisotope division for their constant help and support.

Funding

The research work is supported by the core grant of National Institute of Plant Genome Research from Department of Biotechnology (DBT) Government of India. PKB thanks Department of Biotechnology, Govt. of India while DV thanks University Grants Commission, Govt. of India for fellowship. DS thanks Department of Science and Technology (DST), Govt. of India for inspire faculty position. AKS thanks Department of Biotechnology, Govt. of India for the TATA Innovation fellowship.

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  1. National Institute of Plant Genome Research, New Delhi, 110067, India

    Prakash Kumar Bhagat, Deepanjali Verma, Deepika Sharma & Alok Krishna Sinha

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  1. Prakash Kumar Bhagat
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  2. Deepanjali Verma
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PKB and AKS designed the research. PKB, DV and DS performed the experiments. PKB wrote the manuscript with inputs from DS. Final manuscript was edited and approved by AKS. All authors have read and approved the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Alok Krishna Sinha.

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Bhagat, P.K., Verma, D., Sharma, D. et al. HY5 and ABI5 transcription factors physically interact to fine tune light and ABA signaling in Arabidopsis. Plant Mol Biol 107, 117–127 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11103-021-01187-z

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