Chapter category: RNA
New Perspectives on Noncoding or Short ORF-Encoding RNAs in Plants
Noncoding RNAs: Molecular Biology and Molecular Medicine
Edited by: Jan Barciszewski and Volker A. ErdmannISBN: 0-306-47835-8
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Chapter authors:
Martin Crespi, Anna Campalans, Claude Thermes and Adam Kondorosi
mRNAs that do not contain a long open reading frame (longer than 100 amino acids; sORF-RNAs) have received considerable attention in recent years. These genes are generally not detected by usual sequence analysis and a large number of them likely remain to be discovered. Their functions may involve only the RNA molecule itself (noncodingRNAs), and/or the short ORF-encoded oligopeptides. In eukaryotes, expression studies have revealed a striking diversity of these mRNAs in many cell types from various organisms, which are induced at specific stages of development. This review describes several examples of plant sORF-RNA genes that have been shown as induced during development as well as in stress conditions and discusses the possible outcome of the analysis of their mechanisms of action. During nodule development, the early nodulin gene enod40 is rapidly induced in the dividing cortical cells of the symbiotic root nodule primordium. Over expression of enod40 resulted in cortical cell division in Medicago roots and accelerated nodulation whereas cosuppression of this gene blocked nodule development. Using a transient expression assay, enod40 activity was found to be dependent on the translation of two sORFs (spanning two conserved nucleotide boxes) as well as an inter-ORF region (spanning a potential RNA structure). Another example is the cucumber CR20 gene that is repressed by the phytohormone cytokinin in various plant organs. Other plant genes of the same class are induced during stress conditions such as dehydration processes (cdt-1), phosphate starvation (tps11) and cycloheximide treatment (gut15). Over expression of the cdt-1 gene conferred dehydration tolerance to callus tissues in Craterostigma plants. Recently, several T-DNA insertions in genes without large ORFs displaying very strict tissue-specificity have been identified in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana using systematic insertional mutagenesis. In general, these mRNAs are fairly abundant polyadenylated transcripts but little is known about the molecular mechanisms involving action.
Martin Crespi
Institut des Sciences du Végétal, CNRS, Gif sur Yvette, France
Anna Campalans
Institut des Sciences du Végétal, CNRS, Gif sur Yvette, France
Claude Thermes
Institut des Sciences du Végétal, CNRS, Gif sur Yvette, France
Adam Kondorosi
Institut des Sciences du Végétal, CNRS, Gif sur Yvette, France
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