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Arabidopsis HT1 kinase controls stomatal movements in response to CO2

Nature Cell Biology volume 8, pages 391–397 (2006)Cite this article

An Erratum to this article was published on 01 April 2006

Abstract

Guard cells, which form stomata in leaf epidermes, sense a multitude of environmental signals and integrate this information to regulate stomatal movements1,2. Compared with the advanced understanding of light and water stress responses in guard cells2,3,4, the molecular mechanisms that underlie stomatal CO2 signalling have remained relatively obscure. With a high-throughput leaf thermal imaging CO2 screen, we report the isolation of two allelic Arabidopsis mutants (high leaf temperature 1; ht1-1 and ht1-2) that are altered in their ability to control stomatal movements in response to CO2. The strong allele, ht1-2, exhibits a markedly impaired CO2 response but shows functional responses to blue light, fusicoccin and abscisic acid (ABA), indicating a role for HT1 in stomatal CO2 signalling. HT1 encodes a protein kinase that is expressed mainly in guard cells. Phosphorylation assays demonstrate that the activity of the HT1 protein carrying the ht1-1 or ht1-2 mutation is greatly impaired or abolished, respectively. Furthermore, dominant-negative HT1(K113W) transgenic plants, which lack HT1 kinase activity, show a disrupted CO2 response. These findings indicate that the HT1 kinase is important for regulation of stomatal movements and its function is more pronounced in response to CO2 than it is to ABA or light.

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Figure 1: Changes in leaf temperature of wild-type plants and ht1 mutants in response to CO2 concentration.
Figure 2: Light responses in ht1 mutants at ambient external CO2 concentration.
Figure 3: ht1 mutants show abscisic acid responses.
Figure 4: HT1 is a protein kinase expressed in guard cells.
Figure 5: HT1 kinase activity correlates with CO2 sensitivity.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Y. Machida and K. Harada, K.M. Kawano, E. Kasuya and all of the members of our laboratories for technical assistance and discussion. We also thank the Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center and Cereon Genomics for access to polymorphism information. This research was supported by CREST, JST and the Japan Society of the Promotion of Science (17370019) grants (K.I.), and by National Science Foundation (MCB0417118) and the National Institutes of Health (R01GM060396) grants (J.I.S.).M.I. is a Formas post-doctoral fellow.

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  1. Department of Biology, Faculty of Sciences, Kyushu University, Fukuoka, 812-8581, Japan

    Mimi Hashimoto, Juntaro Negi & Koh Iba

  2. Division of Biological Sciences, Cell and Developmental Biology Section, and Center for Molecular Genetics, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, 92093-0116, CA, USA

    Jared Young, Maria Israelsson & Julian I. Schroeder

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Correspondence to Koh Iba.

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Hashimoto, M., Negi, J., Young, J. et al. Arabidopsis HT1 kinase controls stomatal movements in response to CO2. Nat Cell Biol 8, 391–397 (2006). https://doi.org/10.1038/ncb1387

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