Abstract
Many plant species have leaves with flat blade and adaxial-abaxial asymmetric cell differentiation. An Arabidopsis gene FILAMENTOUS FLOWER (FIL) encodes one of transcription factors important for the leaf lamina growth and cell differentiation. It is well characterized that abaxial specific expression of FIL during leaf primordial development is crucial for its function.
A novel Arabidopsis mutant enlarged fil expression domain2 (enf2 ) which we recently isolated shows larger FIL expression domain than that of wild type. It has been suggested from analyses of this mutant that FIL expression pattern is altered when chloroplast gene expression is impaired. It is known that regulation of many nuclear genes to coordinate with chloroplast condition is mediated by GUN1 gene function. Loss of GUN1 function in enf2 mutant background resulted in suppression of the enlargement of FIL expression domain. This indicated that GUN1 is also involved in FIL expression pattern regulation in response to chloroplast condition. Our presentation will be focusing on above results and ongoing analysis about the cell-autonomous and non-cell-autonomous aspects of the chloroplast effect on FIL expression.
