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Arabidopsis NITROGEN LIMITATION ADAPTATION regulates ORE1 homeostasis during senescence induced by nitrogen deficiency

Nature Plants volume 4, pages 898–903 (2018)Cite this article

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Abstract

Nitrogen is an important macronutrient in plants and its deficiency induces rapid leaf senescence. Two genes, ORE1 and NITROGEN LIMITATION ADAPTATION (NLA), have been implicated in regulating the senescence process but their relationship is unclear1,2. Here, we show that nla and pho2 (also known as ubc24) plants develop rapid leaf senescence under nitrogen-starvation condition, whereas ore1 and nla/ore1 and pho2 (ubc24)/ore1 plants stay green. These results suggest that ORE1 acts downstream of NLA and PHO2 (UBC24). NLA interacts with ORE1 in the nucleus and regulates its stability through polyubiquitination using PHO2 (UBC24) as the E2 conjugase. Our findings identified ORE1 as a downstream target of NLA/PHO2 (UBC24) and showed that post-translational regulation of ORE1 levels determines leaf senescence during nitrogen deficiency.

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Fig. 1: Leaf senescence phenotype in various genotypes under nitrogen-deficient condition.
Fig. 2: ORE1 target gene expression in various genotypes under nitrogen-sufficient or -deficient condition.
Fig. 3: ORE1 interacts with NLA in vivo and its polyubiquitination is controlled by NLA and PHO2 (UBC24).
Fig. 4: Nitrogen deficiency destabilizes ORE1 protein in Arabidopsis.

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Data availability

All data generated or analysed in this study are included in this article and Supplementary Information files. The data are available from the corresponding author upon request.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by an RSSS grant (no. NRF-RSSS-002) from the National Research Foundation, Singapore to N.H.C and by a MEXT KAKENHI grant (no. 25113001), Japan to N.M.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory, National University of Singapore, 117604, Singapore

    Bong Soo Park, Tao Yao, Jun Sung Seo, Eriko Chi Cheng Wong, Chung-Hao Huang & Nam-Hai Chua

  2. Plant Gene Regulation Research Group, Bioproduction Research Institute, National Institute of Advanced Industrial Science and Technology, Tsukuba, Ibaraki, Japan

    Nobutaka Mitsuda

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Contributions

B.S.P. and N.H.C. designed the experiments. B.S.P., T.Y., J.S.S., E.C.C.W., C.H.H. and N.M. executed the experiments. All of the authors interpreted and discussed the data. B.S.P. and N.H.C. wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Nam-Hai Chua.

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Supplementary Figures 1–7, Supplementary Tables 1–4.

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Park, B.S., Yao, T., Seo, J.S. et al. Arabidopsis NITROGEN LIMITATION ADAPTATION regulates ORE1 homeostasis during senescence induced by nitrogen deficiency. Nature Plants 4, 898–903 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41477-018-0269-8

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