Short Communication

TOPLESS co-repressor interactions and their evolutionary conservation in plants

Volume 7, Issue 3   March 2012
Pages 325 - 328
http://dx.doi.org/10.4161/psb.19283
Keywords: Physcomitrella patens , TOPLESS, arabidopsis, co-repression, protein-protein interaction
Authors: Barry Causier, James Lloyd, Laura Stevens and Brendan Davies

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Abstract:
Large-scale protein-protein interaction studies recently demonstrated that the Arabidopsis TPL/TPR family of transcriptional co-repressors is involved in a broad range of developmental processes. TPL/TPRs predominantly interact with transcription factors that contain repression domain (RD) sequences. Interestingly, RDs reported in the literature are quite diverse in sequence, yet TPL/TPRs interact with proteins containing all of the known motifs. These data lead us to conclude that the TPL/TPRs act as general repressors of gene transcription in plants. To investigate this further, we examined interactions between TPL/TPR proteins encoded by the moss Physcomitrella patens genome and components of the auxin signaling pathway. As in Arabidopsis, moss TPL proteins interact with AUX/IAA and ARF proteins, suggesting that they act in both forms of ARF-mediated transcriptional repression. These data suggest that the involvement of TPL in auxin signaling has been conserved across evolution, since mosses and angiosperms diverged approximately 450 million years ago.

Received: December 6, 2011; Accepted: January 6, 2012; Published Online: March 1, 2012

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