A Comprehensive Expression Analysis of the Arabidopsis Proline-rich Extensin-like Receptor Kinase Gene Family using Bioinformatic and Experimental Approaches

Abstract

The Arabidopsis proline-rich extensin-like receptor kinase (PERK) family consists of 15 predicted receptor kinases. A comprehensive expression analysis was undertaken to identify overlapping and unique expression patterns within this family relative to their phylogeny. Three different approaches were used to study AtPERK gene family expression, and included analyses of the EST, MPSS and NASCArrays databases as well as experimental RNA blot analyses. Some of the AtPERK members were identified as tissue-specific genes while others were more broadly expressed. While in some cases there was a good association between these different expression patterns and the position of the AtPERK members in the kinase phylogeny, in other cases divergence of expression patterns was seen. The PERK expression data identified by the bioinformatics and experimental approaches were found generally to show similar trends and supported the use of data from large-scale expression studies for obtaining preliminary expression data. Thus, the bioinformatics survey for ESTs and microarrays is a powerful comprehensive approach for obtaining a genome-wide view of genes in a multigene family.

Molecular Interactions of Arabinogalactan Proteins with Cortical Microtubules and F-Actin in Bright Yellow-2 Tobacco Cultured Cells

“…7). Transmembrane proteins such as wallassociated kinases, cellulose synthases, endo-1-4-b-Dglucanases, Pro-rich extensin-like receptor kinases, formins, phospholipase-D, and lectin receptor kinases (Kohorn, 2000(Kohorn, , 2001Baluska et al, 2003;Nakhamchik et al, 2004;Gouget et al, 2006) may interact directly with AGPs to mediate such cell wall-plasma membranecytoskeleton connections. Most of these proteins have either an extracellular or a transmembrane domain that may interact with AGPs to mediate signaling at the plant cell surface.…”

Irritable Walls: The Plant Extracellular Matrix and Signaling

“…Another family of receptor kinase-like proteins recently implicated in cell wall signaling is termed PERK, as its 11 Arabidopsis members contain a Prorich region extracellular domain similar to extensin (EXT; Nakhamchik et al, 2004). EXTs are a group of Hyp-rich, rod-shaped extracellular proteins typically containing repeats of the Ser-Hyp (3-5) motif, with most Hyp residues typically being glycosylated by one to four Ara residues (Showalter, 1993).…”

RNAi mediated silencing of a wall associated kinase, OsiWAK1 in Oryza sativa results in impaired root development and sterility due to anther indehiscence

“…Out of numerous proteins found in the cell wall (Kohorn 2000;Baluska et al 2003), only a few have the potential to act as molecular linkers between the elements of the cytoskeleton and components of cell wall. These include proteins like the arabinogalactan proteins (AGPs; Nothnagel 1997), COBRA (Schindelman et al 2001), wallassociated Kinases (WAKs; Wagner and Kohorn 2001; reviewed in Kanneganti and Gupta 2008), formins (Deeks et al 2002) and proline rich extension-like receptor kinases (PERKs; Nakhamchik et al 2004). Among these, only the WAKs and PERKs have the potential to signal directly to the cytoplasm via the protein kinase domain.…”