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Review
. 2022 Jul 14;2(1):26.
doi: 10.1007/s44154-022-00048-z.

Regulatory network established by transcription factors transmits drought stress signals in plant

Yongfeng Hu  1 , Xiaoliang Chen  2 , Xiangling Shen  3
Affiliations
Review

Regulatory network established by transcription factors transmits drought stress signals in plant

Yongfeng Hu et al. Stress Biol. .

Abstract

Plants are sessile organisms that evolve with a flexible signal transduction system in order to rapidly respond to environmental changes. Drought, a common abiotic stress, affects multiple plant developmental processes especially growth. In response to drought stress, an intricate hierarchical regulatory network is established in plant to survive from the extreme environment. The transcriptional regulation carried out by transcription factors (TFs) is the most important step for the establishment of the network. In this review, we summarized almost all the TFs that have been reported to participate in drought tolerance (DT) in plant. Totally 466 TFs from 86 plant species that mostly belong to 11 families are collected here. This demonstrates that TFs in these 11 families are the main transcriptional regulators of plant DT. The regulatory network is built by direct protein-protein interaction or mutual regulation of TFs. TFs receive upstream signals possibly via post-transcriptional regulation and output signals to downstream targets via direct binding to their promoters to regulate gene expression.

Keywords: Direct target; Drought tolerance; Plant; Regulatory network; Transcription factor.

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Conflict of interest statement

All authors declare no competing interests.

Figures

Fig. 1
Fig. 1
NAC family TFs involved in drought tolerance. The phylogenetic tree was drawn according to (Ooka et al. 2003). 105 NAC genes belonging to 14 subgroups (including unclassified) have been studied to regulate drought tolerance
Fig. 2
Fig. 2
ERF family TFs involved in drought tolerance. The phylogenetic tree was drawn according to (Sakuma et al. 2002). 67 ERF genes assigned to all the subgroups except B-5 were discovered to play important roles in drought tolerance
Fig. 3
Fig. 3
WRKY family TFs involved in drought tolerance. The phylogenetic tree was drawn according to (Rushton et al. 2010). 65 WRKY genes covering all the seven WRKY subfamilies have been revealed to participate in drought tolerance
Fig. 4
Fig. 4
bZIP family TFs involved in drought tolerance. The phylogenetic tree was drawn according to (Droge-Laser et al. 2018). 58 bZIP proteins identified to play roles in drought tolerance fall in nine groups
Fig. 5
Fig. 5
MYB family TFs involved in drought tolerance. The phylogenetic tree was drawn according to (Dubos et al. 2010). Functional studies on 54 R2R3-MYBs assigned to 13 subgroups as well as unidentified group have been performed for drought tolerance
Fig. 6
Fig. 6
The diagram of drought signaling transmitted by regulatory network. Drought-induced post-transcriptional regulation of transcription factors (TFs) may function to transmit the signal to TFs by activating TFs such as phosphorylation and translocation of TFs, or to mitigate intensity of the signal by compromising TFs such as ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS) mediated protein degradation and microRNA (miRNA). The regulatory network is built by mutual regulation of TFs (activation or repression) and interaction of TFs that is not shown in the figure to trigger cellular and physiological responses by directly regulating related genes. The regulation of TFs and downstream genes here refers to direct binding of TFs to promoters of target genes which has been experimentally proved to regulate their expression. How TFs and epigenetic regulation that mediates stress memory cooperate for fine tuning of drought-responsive genes will be of great interest in the future
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