Cellulose biosynthesis inhibitors modulate defense transcripts and regulate genes that are implicated in cell wall re-structuring in arabidopsis

Abstract

The cell wall is a multifunctional structure which is implicated in plant growth and development as well as responding to any environmental changes including biotic and abiotic stresses. One of the practical approaches in cell wall integrity studies is the modification of the quality and quantity of particular cell wall components or destroying the specific step in cell wall synthesis pathway using Cellulose Biosynthesis Inhibitors (CBIs). In this case, chemical screen for swollen organ phenotype has proved to be an important technique to identify the genes that are directly or indirectly involved in cellulose biosynthesis. In the present research, a number of synthetic CBIs were obtained through a chemical library screen from Chembridge Company for the root swollen phenotype which is believed to be the response to a defect in cellulose biosynthesis. Therefore, a genome-wide expression profiling based on Affymetrix ATH1 GeneChip arrays (contains 22810 probe sets) were applied to investigate the altered transcriptome of four different CBIs including CBI-15, 18, 22, and 27 and isoxaben in 5 day-old Arabidopsis thaliana seedlings. The results of this project revealed overlapped up and down-regulated genes as well as discriminate responses to each CBI. The most striking modification were found in genes involve in response to the stress as well as cell wall integrity and restructuring. Thus, the identification of regulated genes under CBIs treatment suggests a robust candidate group of genes that likely to be correlated to cell wall biosynthesis.