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Review
. 2013 Jun;237(6):1415-24.
doi: 10.1007/s00425-013-1882-4. Epub 2013 Apr 28.

Alternative splicing of transcription factors in plant responses to low temperature stress: mechanisms and functions

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Review

Alternative splicing of transcription factors in plant responses to low temperature stress: mechanisms and functions

Pil Joon Seo et al. Planta. 2013 Jun.

Abstract

Transcription factors play a central role in the gene regulatory networks that mediate various aspects of plant developmental processes and responses to environmental changes. Therefore, their activities are elaborately regulated at multiple steps. In particular, accumulating evidence illustrates that post-transcriptional control of mRNA metabolism is a key molecular scheme that modulates the transcription factor activities in plant responses to temperature fluctuations. Transcription factors have a modular structure consisting of distinct protein domains essential for DNA binding, dimerization, and transcriptional regulation. Alternative splicing produces multiple proteins having different structural domain compositions from a single transcription factor gene. Recent studies have shown that alternative splicing of some transcription factor genes generates small interfering peptides (siPEPs) that negatively regulate the target transcription factors via peptide interference (PEPi), constituting self-regulatory circuits in plant cold stress response. A number of splicing factors, which are involved in RNA binding, splice site selection, and spliceosome assembly, are also affected by temperature fluctuations, supporting the close association of alternative splicing of transcription factors with plant responses to low temperatures. In this review, we summarize recent progress on the temperature-responsive alternative splicing of transcription factors in plants with emphasis on the siPEP-mediated PEPi mechanism.

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Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
Schematic diagram illustrating the alternative splicing patterns of a transcription factor gene and the fates of splice variants. Transcriptionally functional splice variants form homodimers (a). Some splice variants having dimerization domains, but lacking other functional domains may act as siPEPs through peptide interference (PEPi) by competitively inhibiting functional homodimer formation (b). Alternative splicing also plays a role in the regulation of mRNA accumulation by producing aberrant transcripts that contain premature stop codon (PTC), which would be degraded by the nonsense-mediated decay (NMD) pathway (c)

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