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Functional Plant Biology Functional Plant Biology Society
Plant function and evolutionary biology
RESEARCH ARTICLE

Reduction of root flavonoid level and its potential involvement in lateral root emergence in Arabidopsis thaliana grown under low phosphate supply

Huixia Yang A B D , Hong Liu A B D , Gang Li C , Juanjuan Feng A B , Huanju Qin A , Xin Liu A , Hongwei Xue C and Daowen Wang A E
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations

A The State Key Laboratory of Plant Cell and Chromosome Engineering, Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Datun Road, Beijing 100101, China.

B Graduate School of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Yuquan Road, Beijing 100039, China.

C The State Key Laboratory of Plant Molecular Genetics, Institute of Plant Physiology and Ecology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 300 Fenglin Road, Shanghai 200032, China.

D These authors contributed equally to this work.

E Corresponding author. Email: dwwang@genetics.ac.cn

Functional Plant Biology 36(6) 564-573 https://doi.org/10.1071/FP08283
Submitted: 4 November 2008  Accepted: 25 March 2009   Published: 1 June 2009

Abstract

Although it is well known that phosphate (Pi) deficiency affects flavonoid accumulation in higher plants, knowledge on the regulation and potential function of flavonoids in the plants grown with low Pi supply is lacking. In this work, we found that low Pi treatment caused significant reduction of root flavonoid (e.g. quercetin, kaempferol and their derivatives) levels in both Columbia (Col-0) and Landsberg erecta (Ler) ecotypes of Arabidopsis thaliana (L.) Heynh. Further investigations revealed that the dysfunction of PHR1, PHO1, PHO2 and NPC4 did not affect the decrease of root flavonoid level by low Pi treatment. In contrast, pldζ2, a knockout mutant of the Arabidopsis phospholipase Dζ2, exhibited defects in the reduction of root flavonoid level and lateral root (LR) emergence under low Pi conditions. When grown under low Pi supply, the transport of auxin from the shoot apex into the root, expression of the auxin responsive DR5::GUS marker and induction of the auxin responsive genes were all significantly less efficient in pldζ2 than in wild-type (WT) control. This is the first report on the reduction of root flavonoid level and its likely contribution to increased LR emergence in Arabidopsis under Pi deficiency conditions, which may facilitate the adaptation of plants to the growth environments with poor Pi availability.

Additional keywords: kaempferol, phospholipase Dζ2, quercetin.


Acknowledgements

We thank Professor Bill Plaxton (Departments of Biology and Biochemistry, Queen’s University, Canada), Dr Jian Xu (Utrecht University, The Netherlands) and the anonymous reviewers for constructive comments on the manuscript. This work is supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (30521001) and the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2005CB120904).


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