Transcriptional regulation by hitsone modifications under drought stress in Arabidopsis

Abstract

Structural changes of chromatin by modification in histone N-tails correlate with transcriptional regulation on development and morphogenesis in eukaryotes.
We are studying genome-wide transcriptional regulation by histone modification under abiotic stress in Arabidopsis. We are using T-DNA tagged kock-out mutants of genes involved in histone modification, such as methylation, acetylation and deacetylation. Drought sensitivity tests of the knock-out mutants for the histone modification-related genes showed that a mutant of histone deacetylase was sensitive to drought stress. Microarray analysis showed that the expression levels of some stress responsive genes were altered in this mutant. The identification of target sites of histone deacetylase and the analysis for enrichment of histone modification in those gene regions are in progress.