TRANSCRIPTIONAL CONTROL OF THE CELL CYCLE IN PLANTS

PALATNIK, JAVIER F; ERCOLI, MA FLORENCIA; GOLDY, CAMILA; RODRIGUEZ VIRASORO, RAMIRO ESTEBAN

Rosario

Simposio; Simposio de Genómica Funcional de Plantas. Rosario, Argentina; 2017

Plant organ growth occurs through an initial stage of cell proliferation followed byanother of cell expansion and differentiation. Therefore, the control of the cell cycle(CC) is critical to determine the extent of plant growth. CC regulators have anoscillating activities regulated by transcriptional and posttranscriptional mechanisms.For example, E2F and MYB3R transcription factors are involved in controlling geneexpression during the G1/S and G2/M transitions. Genomic studies indicated that onlya subset of genes with expression peaks at the G1/S or G2/M phases are directlyregulated by E2F or MYB3R, suggesting that other transcriptional regulators remain tobe identified. The objective of this work is to identify genes that control the CC usingArabidopsis thaliana roots as model system.We analyzed the transcriptome of cells in the G2/M transition obtained byFluorescence Activated Cell Sorting of protoplasts prepared from roots expressing aGFP reporter of a mitotic cyclin. Analysis of these data yielded ca. 400 genes withexpression enriched in G2/M cells, of which only about 60 have been previouslydescribed to be involved in the CC. Analysis of the remaining genes enabled us toidentify new potential regulators of the CC. The initial characterization of some ofthese candidates will be discussed.