Peach PPZAT12 and Arabidopisis ATZAT12 ortholog transcriptions factors have conserved molecular roles

GISMODI, MAURO; GABILONDO, JULIETA; BUDDE, CLAUDIO OLAF; LARA, MARÍA VALERIA; DRINCOVICH, MARÍA FABIANA; BUSTAMANTE, CLAUDIA

Paraná

Congreso; LIV Reunión Anual de SAIB; 2018

Sociedad Argentina de Investigación Bioquímica y Biología Molecular

Cold storage (CS) is needed to prevent the rapid decay of peaches at ambient temperature. However, low temperature can generate chilling injury(CI), a group of physiological disorders which severely affects fruit quality. Many post-harvest approaches were developed to prevent CI, beingheat treatment (HT) a proven efficient strategy. C2H2 transcription factor-encoding PpZAT12 was HT- and CS-induced in CI-tolerant cultivars,as A. thaliana AtZAT12. Both 35S::AtZAT12 and 35S::PpZAT12/KO-AtZAT12 A. thaliana transgenic lines showed impaired growth anddevelopment, rendering smaller plants (compared to Wild Type Col-0) with flowering time delay, curved leaves and down-pointing siliques.Known targets of AtZAT12 were assessed by RT-qPCR and a label-free proteomic approach was performed on adult leaves, finding manymolecules commonly modified in gain-of-function genotypes. These results suggest that ZAT12 orthologs could have similar molecularmechanisms to in vivo regulate phytohormones metabolism, stress responses, RNA processing, retrograde signaling and photosynthesis. In silicoanalyses of putative targets not only pointed out their relationship with observed phenotypes but also with temperature stress protection.Moreover, their fruit orthologs present conserved temperature-driven expression. Overall, ZAT12 orthologs have similar genomic features,temperature sensitivity and molecular mechanisms to allow plant cells to tolerate undesired agronomic disorders, such as CI.