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WRKY Transcription Factor Responses and Tolerance to Abiotic Stresses in Plants
Version 1
: Received: 2 June 2024 / Approved: 3 June 2024 / Online: 3 June 2024 (08:04:33 CEST)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Ma, Z.; Hu, L. WRKY Transcription Factor Responses and Tolerance to Abiotic Stresses in Plants. Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2024, 25, 6845. Ma, Z.; Hu, L. WRKY Transcription Factor Responses and Tolerance to Abiotic Stresses in Plants. Int. J. Mol. Sci. 2024, 25, 6845.
Abstract
Plants are subjected to abiotic stresses throughout their developmental period. Abiotic stresses include drought, salt, heat, cold, heavy metals, nutritional element and oxidative stresses. Improving plant response to various environmental stresses is critical for plant survival and perpetuation. The WRKY transcription factors have special structure (WRKY structural domains), which enable WRKY transcription factors to have different transcriptional regulatory functions. The WRKY transcription factors can not only regulate abiotic stresses response and plant growth and development by regulating phytohormone signalling pathways, but also promote or suppress the expression of downstream genes by binding to the W-box [TGACCA/TGACCT] in the promoters of their target genes. In addition, WRKY transcription factors not only interact with other families of transcription factors to regulate plant defence responses in abiotic stresses, but also self-regulate by recognizing and binding to W-boxes in their own target genes to regulate their defence responses to abiotic stresses. However, in recent years, research reviews on the regulatory roles of WRKY transcription factors in higher plants are scarce and shallow. In this review, we focus on the structure and classification of WRKY transcription factors, as well as the identification of their downstream target genes and molecular mechanisms involved in the response to abiotic stresses, which can improve the tolerance ability of plants in abiotic stress and we also look forward to their future research directions, with a view to providing theoretical support for the genetic improvement of crop abiotic stresses tolerance.
Keywords
WRKY transcription factor; abiotic stress response and tolerance; target gene; plant growth and development
Subject
Biology and Life Sciences, Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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