Published July 5, 2023 | In Press + Supplemental Material
Journal Article Open

Phosphate deprivation‐induced changes in tomato are mediated by an interaction between brassinosteroid signaling and zinc

An error occurred while generating the citation.

Abstract

Inorganic phosphate (Pi) is a necessary macronutrient for basic biological processes. Plants modulate their root system architecture (RSA) and cellular processes to adapt to Pi deprivation albeit with a growth penalty. Excess application of Pi fertilizer, on the contrary, leads to eutrophication and has a negative environmental impact. We compared RSA, root hair elongation, acid phosphatase activity, metal ion accumulation, and brassinosteroid hormone levels of Solanum lycopersicum (tomato) and Solanum pennellii, which is a wild relative of tomato, under Pi sufficiency and deficiency conditions to understand the molecular mechanism of Pi deprivation response in tomato. We showed that S. pennellii is partially insensitive to phosphate deprivation. Furthermore, it mounts a constitutive response under phosphate sufficiency. We demonstrate that activated brassinosteroid signaling through a tomato BZR1 ortholog gives rise to the same constitutive phosphate deficiency response, which is dependent on zinc overaccumulation. Collectively, these results reveal an additional strategy by which plants can adapt to phosphate starvation.

Additional Information

© 2023 The Authors. New Phytologist © 2023 New Phytologist Foundation. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. We thank Tsuyoshi Nakagawa for the pGWB402 plasmid. We thank Dr A. Singh (NIPGR) for helpful discussions. GSD was supported by the Resnick Sustainability Institute Postdoctoral Fellowship. This work was funded by a BARD Research Grant Agreement No. IS-4827-15 to SMB and SS-G. Additional support was provided by an HHMI Faculty Scholar and National Science Foundation 1856749, 2119820 and 1238243 and SS-G has received funding from the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program under the Grant Agreement No. (727929) (TOMRES). DT is grateful for financial support from European Regional Development Fund Project, Centre for Experimental Plant Biology No. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000738. Author contributions GSD, DJG and SMB designed the research. GSD performed all experiments and analysis of the Slbzr1 mutant. DJG performed all experiments and analysis relating to the S. pennellii results. XY, KP and SK helped with the performance of experiments. EE performed ICP experiments in tomato in response to BR perturbations and performed sensitivity assays. HK performed ICP analysis in Arabidopsis, sensitivity assays, and prepared material for BR measurements. DT measured BR compounds. GH performed some of the statistical analysis. AC-P helped with the generation of bzr1 tomato stable mutants. CM generated the phylogenetic maps. JNM and SS-G contributed to the design and supervision of the research. GSD, SS-G and SMB wrote the manuscript. All authors edited the manuscript. GSD and DJG contributed equally to this work. Data availability. Our gene expression data are publicly available in GEO, under accession no. GSE214195. The R scripts used for RSA and root hair length analysis are provided at https://github.com/BradyLab/DemirerPhosphate. In addition to the data provided in the manuscript, images and other raw data can be accessed at this link: Demirer et al. (2023), Raw image data for "Phosphate deprivation-induced changes in tomato are mediated by an interaction between brassinosteroid signalling and zinc", Dryad, Dataset, https://doi.org/10.25338/B8V656. Competing interests: None declared.

Attached Files

Supplemental Material - nph19007-sup-0001-figs_s1-s18.pdf

In Press - New_Phytologist_-_2023_-_Demirer_-_Phosphate_deprivation‐induced_changes_in_tomato_are_mediated_by_an_interaction_between.pdf

Files

nph19007-sup-0001-figs_s1-s18.pdf

Additional details

Created:
August 22, 2023
Modified:
October 23, 2023