A molecular brake and release keep plant stem cells balanced at growing tips
Xie Y, Du L, Chen Z, Li X, Jiang D
Plant Signaling
The stem cells at the tip of every shoot in your garden decide how tall, bushy, or flowering a plant becomes, and this work reveals a fine-tuning switch that controls them.
Plants keep some genes quieted with chemical tags on their DNA packaging. This study shows a protein that reads those tags also grabs the gene's fresh message and slows it down, until a cap-binding partner knocks it loose and lets production finish. The plant uses this brake-and-release trick to keep the stem cells at its growing tip in balance.
Key Findings
The H3K27me3 reader LHP1 binds nascent precursor mRNA through its middle intrinsically disordered region at H3K27me3-marked loci, reducing transcription efficiency.
The mRNA cap-binding complex disrupts the LHP1-RNA interaction, allowing transcription to be completed.
This interplay fine-tunes WUSCHEL transcription in the shoot apical meristem, maintaining stem cell homeostasis in Arabidopsis thaliana.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Researchers found that a protein in thale cress acts like a brake on gene activity at silenced-marked genes, then gets cleared away by another molecular complex so the gene can finish being read. This tug-of-war helps keep the plant's stem cell pool at the growing tip in balance.
Abstract Preview
Original paper
Dynamic Polycomb-CBC crosstalk orchestrates mRNA production at transcriptionally active loci in plants.
Histone modifications and cotranscriptional processing play fundamental roles in regulating eukaryotic gene transcription. Active histone modifications and efficient cotranscriptional mRNA processi...
open_in_new Read full abstractAbstract copyright held by the original publisher.
Species Mentioned
Was this useful?
Want to tell us more? (optional)
Thanks for the note!
Something went wrong — please try again.
Too many submissions. Try again in an hour.
Targeted knockout of a host peroxisomal peptidase confers field resistance to...
The corn in your grocery store and the staple food keeping millions of East African families fed is under serious threat from a viral disease that can wipe o...
Arabidopsis thaliana, the thale cress, mouse-ear cress or arabidopsis, is a small plant from the mustard family (Brassicaceae), native to Eurasia and Africa. Commonly found along the shoulders of roads and in disturbed land, it is generally considered a weed.