Abstract
The two-component regulatory systems involving histidine-kinases (HK), which serve as signal receptors, are widespread and general signal transduction strategies in plants. In fact, HKs act as cytokinin receptors, which play crucial roles in hormone responses in Arabidopsis. Furthermore, the two-component systems-related factors (PRRs) are known as important components of the circadian oscillator. Hence, it is timely and important to generalize the concept of two-component systems to understand the greatly diverse physiology of a wide variety of plant species other than Arabidopsis. For instance, a cytokinin receptor HK is crucially implicated in the root nodule formation in legume species, which yearly provide us with 1/3 of grain production in the whole world.
From this viewpoint, here we conducted an extensive and genome-wide bio-informatics with special reference to the two-component systems- and/or circadian clock-associated genes by adopting the genome databases of Lotus japonicus, which is a model legume species. We will present comprehensive information from such analyses, together with some critical experimental results with the plant.
