Functional analysis of transcription factors in Arabidopsis

Abstract

Transcription factors (TFs) regulate the expression of genes at the transcriptional level. Modification of TF activity dynamically alters the transcriptome, which leads to metabolic and phenotypic changes. Thus, functional analysis of TFs using 'omics-based' methodologies is one of the most important areas of the post-genome era. In this mini-review, we present an overview of Arabidopsis TFs and introduce strategies for the functional analysis of plant TFs, which include both traditional and recently developed technologies. These strategies can be assigned to five categories: bioinformatic analysis; analysis of molecular function; expression analysis; phenotype analysis; and network analysis for the description of entire transcriptional regulatory networks.

Fig. 1

Schematic drawing summarizing the molecular analysis of TFs. The effector and reporter plasmids are co-introduced into Arabidopsis leaf by particle bombardment. Reporter activity is measured to examine whether a TF is an activator or a repressor.

Fig. 2

Histogram from a large-scale microarray experiment showing distributions of averaged, normalized signals of 21,099 non-TF genes and 2,155 TF genes among a ‘developmental set’ of genes (Schmid et al. 2005). The distribution is not drastically different between non-TFs and TFs. The frequency of highly expressed genes is higher in non-TFs than in TFs (indicated by a green bracket).