Abstract
The recent genome-wide studies have revealed that transcription factors play pivotal roles in regulation of various biological functions in plants. However, plant genes are frequently duplicated and many transcription factors form large family. This structural and functionally redundancy of plant transcription factors often interfere with efforts to identify the function of these factors. Even when gene-knockout or antisense lines for a transcription factor can be isolated, such lines of ten fail to exhibit an informative phenotype that might provide some direct clue to the function of the factor, such as loss-of-function phenotype.
To overcome the difficulty of the functional analysis of redundant transcription factors, we developed novel gene silencing system using dominant repressor (CRES-T system). In this report, we describe the efficiency and effectivity of the CRES-T system for the functional analysis of plant transcription factors and deisucss the possible mechanism of the repression via EAR-motif repression domain.
