Exogenous ethanol treatment alleviates oxidative damage of under conditions of high-light stress.

Abiotic stresses, such as high light and salinity, are major factors that limit crop productivity and sustainability worldwide. Chemical priming is a promising strategy for improving the abiotic stress tolerance of plants. Recently, we discovered that ethanol enhances high-salinity stress tolerance in and rice by detoxifying reactive oxygen species (ROS).

CP12 Is Involved in Protection against High Light Intensity by Suppressing the ROS Generation in PCC7942.

We previously reported that CP12 formed a complex with GAPDH and PRK and regulated the activities of these enzymes and the Calvin-Benson cycle under dark conditions as the principal regulatory system in cyanobacteria. More interestingly, we found that the cyanobacterial CP12 gene-disrupted strain was more sensitive to photo-oxidative stresses such as under high light conditions and paraquat treatment. When a mutant strain that grew normally under low light was subjected to high light conditions, decreases in chlorophyll and photosynthetic activity were observed.

Sugar Transporter Protein 1 (STP1) contributes to regulation of the genes involved in shoot branching via carbon partitioning in Arabidopsis.

We previously demonstrated that alterations in sugar partitioning affect the expression of genes involved in hormone biosynthesis and responses, including BRANCHED1 (BRC1), resulting in enhanced shoot branching in transgenic Arabidopsis plants overexpressing cyanobacterial fructose-1,6-bisphosphatase-II in the cytosol (AcF). The exogenous treatment of wild-type Arabidopsis plants with sugars showed the same transcript characteristics, indicating that sugars act as a signal for branching. We also found that the reductions induced in BRC1 expression levels in wild-type plants by the sugar treatments were suppressed in the knockout mutant of sugar transporter 1 (stp1-1).

The basic helix-loop-helix transcription factor, bHLH11 functions in the iron-uptake system in Arabidopsis thaliana.

Iron (Fe) is a micronutrient that is essential for plant development and growth. Basic helix-loop-helix (bHLH) transcription factors are a superfamily of transcription factors that are important regulatory components in transcriptional networks in plants. bHLH transcription factors have been divided into subclasses based on their amino acid sequences and domain structures.

Clade Ib basic helix-loop-helix transcription factor, bHLH101, acts as a regulatory component in photo-oxidative stress responses.

The accumulation of reactive oxygen species (ROS) leads to oxidative damage; however, ROS also acts as signaling molecules. We previously demonstrated that the inducible silencing of thylakoid membrane-bound ascorbate peroxidase Arabidopsis plants (IS-tAPX) accumulated HO in their chloroplasts, resulting in the clarification of ROS-responsive genes. In IS-tAPX plants, the transcript levels of the basic helix-loop-helix (bHLH) transcription factor bHLH101, which belongs to clade Ib bHLH, were down-regulated.