Molecular study of ORPHEUS, a transcription factor potentially involved in (cell) expansion of Arabidopsis thaliana hypocotyls

Abstract

Nowadays society faces a worrying energy sources shortage due to the growth of the world population and the rapid exhaustion of fossil fuel reserves. Renewable energy as plant biomass plays a central role to face the future, thus the increase in plant mass is an important target. Consequently, cell expansion mechanism, greatly contributing to biomass, is a current topic in scientific studies. Because of the suitable characteristics as a model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana was chosen in order to perform the present study. An interesting Arabidopsis mutant, apollo, was isolated at Professor Vissenberg’s lab. Light-grown apollo shows a 4 times hypocotyl length increase over WT plants due to increased cell elongation. In this work we introduce ORPHEUS, a gene affected by the T-DNA insertion in apollo. Its study can provide useful knowledge about the mechanism/regulation of cell expansion