Functional characterization of peach fruit PpZAT12 and Arabidopsis AtZAT12 transcription factors

GISMONDI M.; BUDDE C.; BUSTAMANTE C. A.; GABILONDO J.; DRINCOVICH M. F.; STROLOGO L.; LARA M. V.

Córdoba

Congreso; LII Reunión de la Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Bioquímica y Biología Molecular; 2016

Sociedad Argentina de Investigación en Bioquímica y Biología Molecular (SAIB)

Refrigeration is used to prevent the rapid decay of peaches at ambient temperature. However, low temperatures can generate chilling injury (CI), a group of physiological disorders which severely affects fruit quality. Many postharvest approaches were developed to prevent CI, being heat treatment (HT) prior to cold storage a proven efficient strategy. PpZAT12 mRNA was induced in HT-treated fruits and also after cold storage of CI-tolerant cultivars. It encodes a C2H2-type zinc finger transcription factor with an EAR repressor motif, as the reported systemic stress marker AtZAT12 from A. thaliana. Cold- and heat-driven inductions of AtZAT12 mRNA were confirmed in different organs. Comparative promoter analysis of phylogenetic-clustered orthologues from different species allowed us to identify conserved cis elements which would account for the diversity of stimuli that generally alters ZAT12 expression. We obtained 35S::AtZAT12 and 35S::PpZAT12/KO-AtZAT12 Arabidopsis transgenic lines and both had impaired growth, rendering smaller plants (compared to wildtype) with curved leaves. Several targets of AtZAT12 were assessed, showing the different molecular processes in which both genes may be involved in. These results point that the transcription factor PpZAT12 could have a protective role against CI in P. persica, achieved by similar molecular functionalities than AtZAT12 in A. thaliana.