Functional analysis of the COBRA-like family

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1 Plant and Microbial Biology Department, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, United States
2 Energy Biosciences Institute, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, California, United States
3 Division of Biological Sciences, University of California, San Diego, San Diego, California, United States
4 DNAnexus, Mountain View, California, United States
DOI
10.7287/peerj.preprints.1740v1
Published
Accepted
Subject Areas
Plant Science
Keywords
Plant cell wall, cellulose biosynthesis, COBRA
Copyright
© 2016 Sorek et al.
Licence
This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ PrePrints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
Cite this article
Sorek N, Ryan A, Carroll A, Somerville C. 2016. Functional analysis of the COBRA-like family. PeerJ PrePrints 4:e1740v1

Abstract

The COBRA protein is found only in higher plants and algae, and has been implicated in cellulose synthesis, but its specific function remains unknown. To shed light on COBRA function we tested the ability of putative Arabidopsis COBRA orthologs to complement mutations in the COBRA gene. We expanded the previously published phylogenetic analysis and found that COBRA genes can be grouped into five clades. Representative COBRA genes from the different clades were expressed in a cobra mutant background. Surprisingly, none of the COBRA-LIKE genes was able to complement cobra, including the closest homolog which we found to bind cellulose with the same avidity as COBRA. We hypothesize that the lack of ability of the COBRA-LIKE genes to complement the cobra mutant is due to an unidentified binding interaction that is sensitive to the structure of the COBRA-LIKE proteins. However, membrane-based yeast two hybrid assays failed to identify positive interactors for COBRA.

Author Comment

This is a submission to PeerJ for review.

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