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The Company of Biologists, Biology Open, 12(5), p. 1806-1820, 2016

DOI: 10.1242/bio.021402

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Strigolactone regulates shoot development through a core signalling pathway

This paper is made freely available by the publisher.
This paper is made freely available by the publisher.

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Abstract

Strigolactones are a recently identified class of hormone that regulate multiple aspects of plant development. The DWARF14 (D14) α/β fold protein has been identified as a strigolactone receptor, which can act through the SCF^MAX2 ubiquitin ligase, but the universality of this mechanism is not clear. Multiple proteins have been suggested as targets for strigolactone signalling, including both direct proteolytic targets of SCF^MAX2, and downstream targets. However, the relevance and importance of these proteins to strigolactone signalling in many cases has not been fully established. Here we assess the contribution of these targets to strigolactone signalling in adult shoot developmental responses. We find that all examined strigolactone responses are regulated by SCF^MAX2 and D14, and not by other D14-like proteins. We further show that all examined strigolactone responses likely depend on degradation of SMXL proteins in the SMXL6 clade, and not on the other proposed proteolytic targets BES1 or DELLAs. Taken together, our results suggest that in the adult shoot, the dominant mode of strigolactone signalling is D14-initiated, MAX2-mediated degradation of SMXL6-related proteins. We confirm that the BRANCHED1 transcription factor and the PIN-FORMED1 auxin efflux carrier are plausible downstream targets of this pathway in the regulation of shoot branching, and show that BRC1 likely acts in parallel to PIN1. ; Other ; This work was funded by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation (GAT3272C), the UK Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council via the European Research Area Plant Genomics programme (R1039101) and by the Chinese Scholarship Council PhD Program (Sichuan Agricultural University) to Y.L.