Plant interstitial telomere motifs participate in the control of gene expression in root meristems

Abstract

SummaryThe promoters of Arabidopsis eEF1A genes contain a telomere motif, the telo-box, associated with an activating sequence, the tef-box. Database searches indicated the presence of telo-boxes in the 5¢ region of numerous genes encoding components of the translational apparatus. By using several promoter constructs we demonstrate that the telo-box is required for the expression of a b-glucoronidase gene in root primordia of transgenic Arabidopsis. This effect was observed when a telo-box was inserted upstream or downstream from the transcription initiation site, and occurred in synergy with the tef-box. These results clearly indicate that interstitial telomere motifs in plants are involved in control of gene expression. Southwestern screening of a lZAP library with a doublestranded Arabidopsis telomere motif resulted in characterization of a protein related to the conserved animal protein Pura. The possibility of a regulation process similar to that achieved by the Rap1p in Saccharomyces cerevisiae is discussed.

Establishing glucose- and ABA-regulated transcription networks in Arabidopsis by microarray analysis and promoter classification using a Relevance Vector Machine

“…4D,E,F). These results were consistent with previous studies showing that the TELO motif was required for GUS expression in root meristems and this activation required the TEF element (Tremousaygue et al 1999). Quantitative analysis of GUS expression in TEF1TELO3ϻGUS transgenic plants showed 6.9-fold higher GUS activity in response to glucose compared to mannitol treatment (Fig.…”

“…The TELO motif, the top-ranked classifier of glucoseinduced genes, was originally identified in promoters of genes encoding components of the translational machinery (Tremousaygue et al 1999). Consistent with this, our analysis shows it is significantly enriched in the promoters of protein and nucleotide synthesis genes (Supplemental Table 6).…”

“…It is required, together with other elements such as the TEF, trap40, and IIa/IIb elements, for high-level expression in actively dividing cells in root meristems (Tremousaygue et al 1999(Tremousaygue et al , 2003Manevski et al 2000). Figure 4A shows that promoters containing the TELO motif are maximally expressed 4 h after glucose addition.…”

“…The TELO motif and the associated TEF motif conferred increased gene expression in response to glucose, thus establishing a new role for this element and validating the feature extraction and classification strategy. The TELO motif, together with the adjacent TEF sequence in the eEF1A promoter, was previously shown to direct high-level expression in rapidly cycling primordia (Tremousaygue et al 1999). Recently, the TELO motif was shown to be overrepresented in the promoters of genes up-regulated during axillary bud outgrowth in Arabidopsis, such as ribosomal protein and cell cycle genes (Tatematsu et al 2005).…”

The regulatory code for transcriptional response diversity and its relation to genome structural properties in Arabidopsis thaliana

“…Consistent with increased intergenic upstream distances for multistimuli response genes, TATA box-containing genes were also observed to have longer upstream regions (2,370 nucleotides versus 1,737 nucleotides for TATA-less genes, p ¼ 3.4EÀ34). Motifs reported to control housekeeping genes (TELO-box promoter motif [18]; hexamer promoter motif [19]) or implicated to confer tissue-specific expression (LEAFYATAG [20]) were found to be more associated with genes with narrow range of differential expression response, i.e., their expression is constitutive or their differential expression response is very specific.…”