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Review
. 2024 Jun 21;25(13):6845.
doi: 10.3390/ijms25136845.

WRKY Transcription Factor Responses and Tolerance to Abiotic Stresses in Plants

Affiliations
Review

WRKY Transcription Factor Responses and Tolerance to Abiotic Stresses in Plants

Ziming Ma et al. Int J Mol Sci. .

Abstract

Plants are subjected to abiotic stresses throughout their developmental period. Abiotic stresses include drought, salt, heat, cold, heavy metals, nutritional elements, and oxidative stresses. Improving plant responses to various environmental stresses is critical for plant survival and perpetuation. WRKY transcription factors have special structures (WRKY structural domains), which enable the WRKY transcription factors to have different transcriptional regulatory functions. WRKY transcription factors can not only regulate abiotic stress responses and plant growth and development by regulating phytohormone signalling pathways but also promote or suppress the expression of downstream genes by binding to the W-box [TGACCA/TGACCT] in the promoters of their target genes. In addition, WRKY transcription factors not only interact with other families of transcription factors to regulate plant defence responses to abiotic stresses but also self-regulate by recognising and binding to W-boxes in their own target genes to regulate their defence responses to abiotic stresses. However, in recent years, research reviews on the regulatory roles of WRKY transcription factors in higher plants have been scarce and shallow. In this review, we focus on the structure and classification of WRKY transcription factors, as well as the identification of their downstream target genes and molecular mechanisms involved in the response to abiotic stresses, which can improve the tolerance ability of plants under abiotic stress, and we also look forward to their future research directions, with a view of providing theoretical support for the genetic improvement of crop abiotic stress tolerance.

Keywords: WRKY transcription factor; abiotic stress response and tolerance; plant growth and development; target gene.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Figure 1
Figure 1
Conserved domains of WRKY family transcription factors in Glycine max, Arabidopsis thaliana, and Oryza sativa. These asterisks “*” and the red frames above the maps indicate the domains of conservative cysteine (C), cysteine (C), histidine (H), and cysteine (C), respectively.
Figure 2
Figure 2
Domain structures of different WRKY subfamilies in higher plants. The WRKY motif, the cysteines, and the histidines that form the zinc finger are shown in boxes. The 4 β-strands are shown with dashed arrows.
Figure 3
Figure 3
Impacts of drought stress on plants. Overexpression of WRKY transcription factor genes in plants can reduce ROS production, stomatal closure, and downregulation of noncyclic proteins, and leaf traits, ion toxicity, and nutrient imbalance are suppressed. This allows plants to improve their water retention capacity to cope with plant survival rate under drought stress.

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