Subjects: Biology >> Botany >> Applied botany submitted time 2021-12-19 Cooperative journals: 《广西植物》
Abstract： C2H2 zinc finger proteins are a class of important transcription factors in eukaryotes, which play important roles in plant growth and development and in response to abiotic stresses. OsZAT12, a C2H2 zinc finger protein in rice, which cloned in our previous study, was only expressing in rice roots and localized in the nucleus. Overexpressing OsZAT12 in Arabidopsis exhibited dwarf phenotype. To further investigate the function of OsZAT12 in rice, qRT-PCR was used to analyze the response patterns of OsZAT12 under abiotic stresses and phytohormones treatment, and the promoter elements and transcriptional activity of OsZAT12 was analyzed as well. The results show that OsZAT12 contains two typical C2H2 zinc finger domains and one EAR motif, and has transcriptional repressive activity. The promoter of the OsZAT12 contains elements related to abiotic stresses and phytohormones. The results of abiotic stresses and phytohormones treatment in rice also revealed that low temperature stress (4癈) and phytohormone ABA treatment significantly down-regulated OsZAT12 expression, while osmotic stress (20% PEG 6000), phytohormone BR or IAA treatment significantly up-regulated the expression of OsZAT12. These results indicate that OsZAT12 involves in the changes in response to abiotic stresses and phytohormones in rice. Homozygous OsZAT12 overexpression plants and OsZAT12 knockout plants were obtained using overexpression vector with 35S promoter and CRISPR/Cas9 gene editing technology, respectively. Observation of the phenotype of OsZAT12 overexpression rice showed that compared with the wild type, the plant height of OsZAT12 overexpression plants was significantly shorter at tillering stage, heading stage and maturity stage. The plant height of OsZAT12 knockout plants did not change significantly comparing with the wild type, while the panicle number and seed setting rate of them were significantly lower than those of the wild type. These results indicated that OsZAT12 affected the establishment of agronomic traits such as rice plant type, panicle type and seed setting rate. The results in this study further showed that overexpression of OsZAT12 reduces the sensitivity of rice to exogenous ABA, while the opposite phenotype was observed in OsZAT12 knockout plants. Taken together, it is speculated that the effect of OsZAT12 on plant growth and development might be related to the regulation of this gene in response to abiotic stresses and hormonal signals. This study might provide an experimental basis for molecular design breeding of stress-tolerant and stable yield using OsZAT12 in rice.
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