JXB Advance Access originally published online on May 22, 2007
Journal of Experimental Botany 2007 58(8):2181-2191; doi:10.1093/jxb/erm092
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© 2007 The Author(s).
This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/uk/) which permits unrestricted non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.This paper is available online free of all access charges (see http://jxb.oxfordjournals.org/open_access.html for further details)
RESEARCH PAPER |
Mutational evidence that the Arabidopsis MAP kinase MPK6 is involved in anther, inflorescence, and embryo development
Genome Center of Wisconsin and Department of Horticulture, 1575 Linden Drive, University of Wisconsin, Madison, WI 53706, USA
* To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail: fpat{at}biotech.wisc.edu
Loss-of-function, dominant-negative, and change-of-function genetic approaches were used to investigate the role played by the Arabidopsis mitogen-activated protein (MAP) kinase MPK6 throughout development. Plants homozygous for T-DNA null alleles of MPK6 displayed reduced male fertility and abnormal anther development. In addition, a portion of the seed produced by mpk6 plants was found to contain embryos that had burst out of their seed coats. To address potential functional redundancy, a dominant-negative version of MPK6 was constructed by changing the TEY activation loop motif to the amino acid sequence AEF. Plants expressing MPK6AEF via the MPK6 native promoter were found to produce excessive stomata, consistent with the recently described role of MPK6 in stomatal patterning. A novel floral phenotype characterized by abnormal sepal development was also observed in MPK6AEF lines. The gene expression pattern of the MPK6 native promoter was determined using a YFP–MPK6 fusion construct, and expression was observed throughout most plant tissues, consistent with a role for MPK6 in multiple developmental processes. The YFP–MPK6 construct was found to rescue the fertility phenotype of mpk6 null alleles, indicating that the fusion protein retains its biological activity. It was also observed, however, that plants expressing YFP–MPK6 displayed reduced apical dominance and a shortening of inflorescence internodes. These results suggest that the YFP tag modifies the activity of MPK6 in a manner that affects inflorescence development but not anther development. Taken together, the present results indicate that MPK6 is involved in the regulation of multiple aspects of plant development.
Key words: Anther development, Arabidopsis, embryo development, floral development, MAP kinase, MPK6
Received 20 February 2007; Revised 29 March 2007 Accepted 4 April 2007
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