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Characterization of a splice variant of soybean ERECTA devoid of an intracellular kinase domain in response to shade stress

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Abstract

The receptor-like kinase ERECTA (ER) plays vital roles in plant adaptation under environmental stress including shade avoidance in Arabidopsis. In our previous study, we identified four ER paralogues in soybean (GmERs) that showed high similarities to Arabidopsis ER. Each GmER was predicted to generate diverse alternative splicing variants. However, whether soybean GmERs contribute to shade avoidance is unknown. Here we report our characterization of GmERs in response to shading. Promoter::GUS staining analysis shows that expression of GmER paralogous genes was differentially induced under shade stress. Further analyses show that GmERa.1 and GmERa.2 exhibit a larger distinction in length than the other GmER variants. GmERa.2 has the shortest length of amino acid with only 15 leucine-rich repeats which is the part of the extracellular domain of GmERa.1. Overexpression of GmERa.2 fully rescued the hypocotyl length, leaf area and petiole length, and the sensitivity of the hypocotyl of Arabidopsis mutant er-3 to shading, suggesting that the truncated extracellular domain of GmERa might contribute importantly to shade avoidance.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China grants 31401308, 31671445 and 31371555, and Sichuan Science and Technology Programme (2018HH0108). We are grateful to Muhammad Ahsan Asghar for reviewing the English grammar of the manuscript and to Arabidopsis Biological Resource Center for providing some of the T-DNA insertional Arabidopsis mutant seeds.

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Author notes

  1. Junbo Du, Yan Li, Xin Sun and Liang Yu contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. College of Agronomy, Sichuan Agricultural University/Sichuan Engineering Research Center for Crop Strip Intercropping system/Key Laboratory of Crop Eco-physiology and Farming System in Southwest China (Ministry of Agriculture), Sichuan Agricultural University, Chengdu, 611130, People’s Republic of China

    Junbo Du, Yan Li, Xin Sun, Liang Yu, Hengke Jiang, Qiulin Cao, Jing Shang, Mengyuan Sun, Yi Liu, Kai Shu, Jiang Liu, Taiwen Yong, Weiguo Liu, Feng Yang, Xiaochun Wang, Chunyan Liu & Wenyu Yang

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  1. Junbo Du
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  2. Yan Li
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Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Junbo Du or Wenyu Yang.

Additional information

Corresponding editor: H. A. Ranganath

JD and WY designed the experiments. JD, YL, XS, LY, HJ, QC, JS, MS, LY, KS, JL, TY, WL, FY and XW performed the experiments. JD, YL, XS and LY analysed the data. JD, YL, XS and LY wrote the manuscript.

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Du, J., Li, Y., Sun, X. et al. Characterization of a splice variant of soybean ERECTA devoid of an intracellular kinase domain in response to shade stress. J Genet 97, 1353–1361 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12041-018-1035-4

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12041-018-1035-4

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