Functional dissection of the WRKY family of transcription factors involved in senecence and pathogen defense

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WRKY proteins are a new family of zinc-finger type transcription factors found exclusively in plants. In Arabidopsis thaliana, this large gene family consists of 75 members. The plantspecific existence of this superfamily suggests that WRKY factors are involved in several unique processes required for plant developments and/or for the integration of environmental cues. Although still poorly studied, WRKY Proteins appear to play an important regulatory role under stress-related conditions particularly during defense against phytopathogenic microbes. Aim of this project is to use defined Arabidopsis WRKY "knock-out" and inducible WRKY overexpressor lines for comparative protein profiling studies with wild-type plants under several defined stress-related conditions including senescence. Peptides differentially appearing in such profiles will be identified by MALDI-MS/MALDI-TOF. In addition, we plan to identify WRKY interacting partners with the help of epitope-tagged WRKY proteins and by the use of the split-Ubiquitin-method or the Ras-Recruitment-System.