首页|Single amino acid change alters the ability to specify male or female organ identity

Single amino acid change alters the ability to specify male or female organ identity

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  • NETL
  • NSTL
  • Natl Acad Sciences
The molecular mechanisms underlying the developmental processes that shape living organisms provide a basis to understand the evolution of biological complexity. Gene duplication allows biolog ical functions to become separated, leading to increased complexity through subf unctionalization. Recently, the relative contributions to morphological evolution of changes to the regulatory and/or coding regions of duplicated genes have been the subject of debate. Duplication generated multiple copies of the MADS-box transcrip tion factor genes that play essential roles in specifying organ iden tity in the flower, making this evolutionary novelty a good model to investigate the nature of the changes necessary to drive subfunc tionalization. Here, we show that naturally occurring variation at a single amino acid in a MADS-box transcription factor switches its ability to specify male and female reproductive organs by altering its repertoire of protein-protein interactions. However, these different developmental fates are only manifest because of an underlying variation in the expression pattern of interacting proteins. This shows that the morphological outcomes of changes to protein se quence and gene expression must be interpreted in the context of the wider regulatory network. It also suggests an explanation for the surprisingly widespread duplications of some of the floral transcription factors.

evolutionflower developmentgene duplicationtranscription factors

Chiara A. Airoldi、Sara Bergonzi、Brendan Davies

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Centre for Plant Sciences, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom

Centre for Plant Sciences, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, United Kingdom Department of Developmental Biology, Max Planck Institute for Plant Breeding Research, 50829 Cologne, Germany

2010

10.1073/pnas.1009050107

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America

ISSN：0027-8424
年,卷(期)：2010.107(44)
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