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Updated: May 7, 2026

Measuring Gene Expression in Bombarded Barley Aleurone Layers with Increased Throughput
Published on: March 30, 2018
Light-harvesting chlorophyll a/b-binding proteins, positively involved in abscisic acid signalling, require a
Rui Liu1, Yan-Hong Xu, Shang-Chuan Jiang
1Bioinformatics and Systems Biology Laboratory of the Ministry of Education, Scholl of Life Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, PR China.
Abstract:
The light-harvesting chlorophyll a/b-binding (LHCB) proteins are the apoproteins of the light-harvesting complex of photosystem II. In the present study, we observed that downregulation of any of the six LHCB genes resulted in abscisic acid (ABA)-insensitive phenotypes in seed germination and post-germination growth, demonstrating that LHCB proteins are positively involved in these developmental processes in response to ABA. ABA was required for full expression of different LHCB members and physiologically high levels of ABA enhanced LHCB expression. The LHCB members were shown to be targets of an ABA-responsive WRKY-domain transcription factor, WRKY40, which represses LHCB expression to balance the positive function of the LHCBs in ABA signalling. These findings revealed that ABA is an inducer that fine-tunes LHCB expression at least partly through repressing the WRKY40 transcription repressor in stressful conditions in co-operation with light, which allows plants to adapt to environmental challenges.
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