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HAR1 mediates systemic regulation of symbiotic organ development

Abstract

Symbiotic root nodules are beneficial to leguminous host plants; however, excessive nodulation damages the host because it interferes with the distribution of nutrients in the plant. To keep a steady balance, the nodulation programme is regulated systemically in leguminous hosts1,2. Leguminous mutants that have lost this ability display a hypernodulating phenotype. Through the use of reciprocal and self-grafting studies using Lotus japonicus hypernodulating mutants, har1 (also known as sym78)3, we show that the shoot genotype is responsible for the negative regulation of nodule development. A map-based cloning strategy revealed that HAR1 encodes a protein with a relative molecular mass of 108,000, which contains 21 leucine-rich repeats, a single transmembrane domain and serine/threonine kinase domains. The har1 mutant phenotype was rescued by transfection of the HAR1 gene. In a comparison of Arabidopsis receptor-like kinases, HAR1 showed the highest level of similarity with CLAVATA1 (CLV1)4. CLV1 negatively regulates formation of the shoot and floral meristems through cell–cell communication involving the CLV3 peptide5. Identification of hypernodulation genes thus indicates that genes in leguminous plants bearing a close resemblance to CLV1 regulate nodule development systemically, by means of organ–organ communication.

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Figure 1: Map-based isolation of the L. japonicus HAR1 gene.
Figure 2: Complementation of a har1 mutant with a 12.5-kb genomic fragment containing the complete HAR1 gene.
Figure 3: Schematic diagram and comparison of three LRR receptor kinases.
Figure 4: RNA and DNA blot analyses of HAR1 gene.

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Acknowledgements

We thank A. A. T. van den Brussel, J. Harper, P. M. Gresshoff and T. Ohyama for comments, and S. Sato, Y. Nakamura and S. Tabata for providing draft sequence data on TAC clones and for gene modelling. We also thank E. Kobayashi for horticultural services. This research was supported in part by Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research on Priority Areas and Special Coordination Funds for Promoting Science and Technology to M.K. from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of the Japanese Government. This work was also partly supported by a grant from the programme for Promotion of Basic Research Activities for Innovative Biosciences to K.H.

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Correspondence to Masayoshi Kawaguchi.

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Nishimura, R., Hayashi, M., Wu, GJ. et al. HAR1 mediates systemic regulation of symbiotic organ development. Nature 420, 426–429 (2002). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature01231

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