Perception of Plant Steroid Hormones at the Cell Surface
The proposed research had two main objectives: 1) investigating the molecular mechanism by which BRs activate the BRI1-containing steroid receptor; and 2) to investigate the molecular mechanism of BRI1 function. During the course of this project, several research papers were published from other laboratories, which reported studies similar to our proposed experiments. We therefore changed our research direction and focused our research efforts on 1) molecular genetic studies of several extragenic suppressors of a weak bri1-9 mutant (which were named as EMS-mutagenized bri1 suppressor or ebs) and 2) biochemical characterization of the protein products of the cloned EBS genes. This switch turned out to be extremely successful and led to a surprising discovery that the dwarf phenotype of the well-studied bri1-9 mutant is not due to the failure of the bri1 receptor to bind the plant steroid hormone but rather caused by the retention of a structurally-imperfect but biochemically-competent bri1-9 and its subsequent degradation in the endoplasmic reticulum. This initial discovery coupled with subsequent cloning and further studies of additional EBS genes significantly increased our understanding of the protein quality control mechanisms in plants, a severely under-studied research topic in plant biology.
- Research Organization:
- Univ. of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC)
- DOE Contract Number:
- FG02-05ER15673
- OSTI ID:
- 1069267
- Report Number(s):
- DOE/DE/15673-1
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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