Abiotic stress-inducible receptor-like kinases negatively control ABA signaling in Arabidopsis.pdfVIP

The Plant Journal 2012 doi: 10.1111/j.1365-313X.2012.04901.x Abiotic stress-inducible receptor-like kinases negatively control ABA signaling in Arabidopsis 1 1 1 2,3 3 1 Hidenori Tanaka , Yuriko Osakabe , Shogo Katsura , Shinji Mizuno , Kyonoshin Maruyama , Kazuya Kusakabe , Junya Mizoi1, Kazuo Shinozaki4 and Kazuko Yamaguchi-Shinozaki1,3,* 1Laboratory of Plant Molecular Physiology, Graduate School of Agricultural and Life Sciences, The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo- ku, Tokyo 113-8657, Japan, 2 Graduate School of Science and Technology, Chiba University, Inage, Chiba, 263-8522, Japan, 3Biological Resources and Post-Harvest Division, Japan International Research Center for Agricultural Sciences, Tsukuba, Ibaraki 305-8686, Japan, and 4RIKEN Plant Science Center, Yokohama, Kanagawa 230-0045, Japan Received 31 August 2011; revised 28 December 2011; accepted 29 December 2011. * For correspondence fax +81 3 5841 8009; e-mail akys@mail.ecc.u-tokyo.ac.jp . SUMMARY Membrane-anchored receptor-like protein kinases RLKs recognize extracellular signals at the cell surface and activate the downstream signaling pathway by phosphorylating speci?c target proteins. We analyzed a receptor-like cytosolic kinase RLCK gene, ARCK1, whose expression was induced by abiotic stress. ARCK1 belongs to the cysteine-rich repeat CRR RLK sub-family and encodes a cytosolic protein kinase. The arck1 mutant showed higher sensitivity than the wild-type to ABA and osmotic stress during the post-germinative growth phase. CRK36, an abiotic stress-inducible RLK belonging to the CRR RLK sub-family, was screened as a potential interacting factor with ARCK1 by co-expression analyses and a yeast two-hybrid system. CRK36 physically interacted with ARCK1 in plant cells, and the kinase domain of CRK36 phosphorylated ARCK1 in vitro. We generated CRK36 RNAi transgenic plants, and found that transgenic plants with suppressed CRK36 expression showed higher se