The transcription factor OsbHLH55 regulates leaf inclination through the OsMAPK6-OsWRKY53 signaling pathway in rice.
Ruan CC, Li C, Li T, Alam MS, Yu J
Crop Improvement
PubMedThe rice in your grocery store could become more abundant and cheaper as breeders use discoveries like this to engineer plants that hold their leaves at optimal angles, packing more plants into the same field without shading each other out.
Rice leaves angle away from the stem, and that angle matters enormously for how much sunlight a plant can absorb and how many plants fit in a field. Researchers found a molecular 'brake pedal' protein that controls this angle by responding to a plant growth hormone. When scientists deleted this protein, rice leaves drooped further outward; when they boosted it, leaves stayed more upright — and now breeders have a new genetic target to design better-yielding rice varieties.
Key Findings
Rice plants with the OsbHLH55 gene deleted showed significantly larger leaf inclination angles due to increased parenchyma cell size at the leaf joint, while plants engineered to overproduce the protein showed smaller angles.
OsbHLH55 is directly suppressed by brassinosteroid (a plant growth hormone), and mutant plants lacking it were hypersensitive to brassinosteroid — placing OsbHLH55 as a negative regulator in the brassinosteroid signaling pathway.
OsbHLH55 physically binds to the promoter of another gene (OsWRKY53) to silence it, and is itself chemically modified (phosphorylated) by a stress-signaling enzyme (OsMAPK6), revealing a new molecular pathway linking hormone and stress signaling in leaf architecture.
chevron_right Technical Summary
Scientists identified a protein called OsbHLH55 that controls how much rice leaves angle outward from the stem — a trait directly tied to how densely farmers can plant crops and how much sunlight each plant captures for maximum yield.
Abstract Preview
Leaf inclination, an essential characteristic of ideal plant architecture, plays a crucial role in determining crop yield by influencing leaf area index and planting density. Brassinosteroid (BR) s...
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Rice is a cereal grain and in its domesticated form is the staple food of over half of the world's population, particularly in Asia and Africa. Rice is the seed of the grass species Oryza sativa —or, much less commonly, Oryza glaberrima. Asian rice was domesticated in China some 13,500 to 8,200 y...