A conserved transcriptional regulator is required for RNA-directed DNA methylation and plant development (original) (raw)

  1. Xin-Jian He1,7,
  2. Yi-Feng Hsu1,2,7,
  3. Shihua Zhu3,
  4. Hai-Liang Liu1,
  5. Olga Pontes4,
  6. Jianhua Zhu5,
  7. Xinping Cui6,
  8. Co-Shine Wang2 and
  9. Jian-Kang Zhu1,8
  10. 1Institute for Integrative Genome Biology and Department of Botany and Plant Sciences, University of California at Riverside, Riverside, California 92521, USA;
  11. 2Graduate Institute of Biotechnology, National Chung Hsing University, Taichung 40227, Taiwan;
  12. 3College of Science and Technology, Ningbo University, Ningbo 315211, China;
  13. 4Biology Department, Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, Missouri 63130, USA;
  14. 5Department of Plant Science and Landscape Architecture, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland 20742, USA;
  15. 6Department of Statistics, University of California at Riverside, Riverside, California 92521, USA
  16. ↵7 These authors contributed equally to this work.

Abstract

RNA-directed DNA methylation (RdDM) is a conserved mechanism for epigenetic silencing of transposons and other repetitive elements. We report that the rdm4 (RNA-directed DNA Methylation4) mutation not only impairs RdDM, but also causes pleiotropic developmental defects in Arabidopsis. Both RNA polymerase II (Pol II)- and Pol V-dependent transcripts are affected in the rdm4 mutant. RDM4 encodes a novel protein that is conserved from yeast to humans and interacts with Pol II and Pol V in plants. Our results suggest that RDM4 functions in epigenetic regulation and plant development by serving as a transcriptional regulator for RNA Pol V and Pol II, respectively.

Keywords:

Footnotes