Transcription switches for protoxylem and metaxylem vessel formation
- Minoru Kubo1,
- Makiko Udagawa1,
- Nobuyuki Nishikubo1,
- Gorou Horiguchi1,5,
- Masatoshi Yamaguchi1,
- Jun Ito2,
- Tetsuro Mimura3,
- Hiroo Fukuda1,4, and
- Taku Demura1,6
- 1RIKEN Plant Science Center, Yokohama, Kanagawa 230-0045, Japan; 2RIKEN Discovery Research Institute, Wako, Saitama 351-0198, Japan; 3Department of Biology, Faculty of Sciences, Kobe University, Kobe, Hyogo 657-8501, Japan; 4Department of Biological Sciences, Graduate School of Science, The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-0033, Japan
Abstract
Land plants evolved xylem vessels to conduct water and nutrients, and to support the plant. Microarray analysis with a newly established Arabidopsis in vitro xylem vessel element formation system and promoter analysis revealed the possible involvement of some plant-specific NAC-domain transcription factors in xylem formation. VASCULAR-RELATED NAC-DOMAIN6 (VND6) and VND7 can induce transdifferentiation of various cells into metaxylem- and protoxylem-like vessel elements, respectively, in Arabidopsis and poplar. A dominant repression of VND6 and VND7 specifically inhibits metaxylem and protoxylem vessel formation in roots, respectively. These findings suggest that these genes are transcription switches for plant metaxylem and protoxylem vessel formation.
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Footnotes
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Supplemental material is available at http://www.genesdev.org.
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Article and publication are at http://www.genesdev.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gad.1331305.
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↵5 Present address: National Institute for Basic Biology/Center for Integrative Bioscience, Okazaki, Aichi 444-8585, Japan.
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↵6 Corresponding author.
↵6 E-MAIL demura{at}riken.jp; FAX 81-45-503-9609.
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- Accepted June 17, 2005.
- Received May 9, 2005.
- Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press
