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

WRKY蛋白是植物中新发现的锌指型转录因子家族。在拟南芥中，这个庞大的基因家族由75个成员组成。该超家族的植物特异性存在表明，WRKY因子参与了植物发育和/或环境信号整合所需的几个独特过程。尽管研究还很少，WRKY蛋白似乎在应激相关条件下发挥重要的调节作用，特别是在防御植物病原微生物的过程中。本项目的目的是利用确定的拟南芥WRKY敲除系和诱导型WRKY过表达系，在包括衰老在内的几种特定胁迫相关条件下，与野生型植物进行蛋白谱比较研究。在这些谱图中出现的不同肽将通过MALDI-MS/MALDI-TOF进行鉴定。此外，我们计划在表位标记的WRKY蛋白的帮助下，通过使用分裂泛素方法或ras - recruit - system来识别WRKY相互作用的伙伴。

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.