Plants constantly face a plethora of abiotic and biotic stresses in their natural habitat. Adapting to such changes requires a great degree of phenotypic plasticity that is mainly determined by the plant’s genome. We currently do not know how plants are able to integrate the multitude of partly synergistic/partly antagonistic environmental signals that enable them to respond properly under any ...

WRKY transcription factors play important roles in plant development and stress responses. Here, global expression patterns of pepper CaWRKYs in various tissues as well as response to environmental stresses and plant hormones were systematically analyzed, with an emphasis on fruit ripening. The results showed that most CaWRKYs were expressed in at least two of the tissues tested. Group I, a sub...

Cacao (Theobroma cacao) is one of the most important tropical crops; however, production is threatened by numerous pathogens, including the hemibiotrophic fungus Moniliophthora perniciosa, which causes witches' broom disease. To understand the mechanisms that lead to the development of this disease in cacao, we focused our attention on cacao transcription factors (TFs), which act as master regu...

Wounding is required to be made in the walls of the green seed pod of Opium poppy prior exudation of latex. To withstand this kind of trauma plants regulate expression of some metabolites through an induced transcript level. 167 unique wound-inducible ESTs were identified by a repetitive round of cDNA subtraction after 5 hours of wounding in Papaver somniferum seedlings. Further repetitive reve...

High salinity seriously affects the production of chrysanthemum, so improving the salt tolerance of chrysanthemum becomes the focus and purpose of our research. The WRKY transcription factor (TF) family is highly associated with a number of processes of abiotic stress responses. We isolated DgWRKY4 from Dendranthema grandiflorum, and a protein encoded by this new gene contains two highly conser...

Leaf senescence varies greatly among genotypes of cotton (Gossypium hirsutium L), possibly due to the different expression of senescence-related genes. To determine genes involved in leaf senescence, we performed genome-wide transcriptional profiling of the main-stem leaves of an early- (K1) and a late-senescence (K2) cotton line at 110 day after planting (DAP) using the Solexa technology. The ...

Recent achievements in plant microRNA (miRNA), a large class of small and non-coding RNAs, are very exciting. A wide array of techniques involving forward genetic, molecular cloning, bioinformatic analysis, and the latest technology, deep sequencing have greatly advanced miRNA discovery. A tiny miRNA sequence has the ability to target single/multiple mRNA targets. Most of the miRNA targets are ...

WRKY transcription factors (TFs) modulate plant responses to biotic and abiotic stresses. Here, we characterized a WRKY IIc TF, NtWRKY50, isolated from tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) plants. The results showed that NtWRKY50 is a nuclear-localized protein and that its gene transcript is induced in tobacco when inoculated with the pathogenic bacterium Ralstonia solanacearum. Overexpression of NtWRKY...