YUCCA auxin biosynthetic genes are required for Arabidopsis shade avoidance

Patricia Müller-Moulé; Kazunari Nozue; Melissa L Pytlak; Christine M Palmer; Michael F Covington; Andreah D Wallace; Stacey L Harmer; Julin N Maloof

doi:10.7287/peerj.preprints.2211v1

YUCCA auxin biosynthetic genes are required for Arabidopsis shade avoidance

Patricia Müller-Moulé¹, Kazunari Nozue¹, Melissa L Pytlak¹, Christine M Palmer^1,2, Michael F Covington^1,3, Andreah D Wallace¹, Stacey L Harmer¹, Julin N Maloof ¹

1 Department of Plant Biology, University of California, Davis, Davis, CA, United States

2 Natural Sciences Department, Castleton University, Castleton, Vermont, United States

3 Amaryllis Nucleics, Berkeley, CA, United States

DOI: 10.7287/peerj.preprints.2211v1

Published: 2016-07-02
Accepted: 2016-07-02

Subject Areas: Developmental Biology, Genetics, Plant Science
Keywords: auxin, shade avoidance, phytochrome, photomorphogenesis

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: Müller-Moulé P, Nozue K, Pytlak ML, Palmer CM, Covington MF, Wallace AD, Harmer SL, Maloof JN. 2016. YUCCA auxin biosynthetic genes are required for Arabidopsis shade avoidance. PeerJ Preprints 4:e2211v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.2211v1

Abstract

Plants respond to neighbor shade by increasing stem and petiole elongation. Shade, sensed by phytochrome photoreceptors, causes stabilization of PHYTOCHROME INTERACTING FACTOR (PIF) proteins and subsequent induction of YUCCA auxin biosynthetic genes. To investigate the role of YUCCA genes in shade avoidance we examined auxin signaling kinetics and found that an auxin responsive reporter is rapidly induced within 2 hours of shade exposure. YUCCA2, 5, 8, and 9 are all induced with similar kinetics suggesting that they could act redundantly to control shade-mediated elongation. To test this hypothesis we constructed a yucca2,5,8,9 quadruple mutant and found that the hypocotyl and petiole shade avoidance is completely disrupted. This work shows that YUCCA auxin biosynthetic genes are essential for detectable shade avoidance and that YUCCA genes are important for petiole shade avoidance.

Author Comment

This is a submission to PeerJ for review.