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Article
TOR Is a Negative Regulator of Autophagy in Arabidopsis thaliana
PloS ONE
  • Yimo Liu, Iowa State University
  • Diane C. Bassham, Iowa State University
Document Type
Article
Publication Version
Published Version
Publication Date
1-1-2010
DOI
10.1371/journal.pone.0011883
Abstract
Background: Autophagy is a protein degradation process by which cells recycle cytoplasmic contents under stress conditions or during senescence; a basal level of housekeeping autophagy also occurs under non-stressed conditions. Although a number of genes that function in autophagy (ATG genes) have been identified in plants, the upstream components that regulate the plant autophagy pathway are still obscure. Target of rapamycin (TOR) is a negative regulator of autophagy in both yeast and animals, and homologs of TOR in plants control plant growth and protein synthesis. However, a role for TOR in regulation of autophagy in plants has not been demonstrated previously. Methodology/Principal Findings: In this paper we used RNA interference (RNAi) to generate transgenic plants with reduced AtTOR transcript level. By observing monodansylcadaverine- (MDC) and GFP-AtATG8e-labeled autophagosomes, these plants were demonstrated to have constitutive AtATG18a-dependent autophagy. Reverse transcriptase-PCR also showed increased expression of some AtATG genes in the RNAi-AtTOR plants. Unlike autophagy induced by starvation or salt stress, an NADPH oxidase inhibitor did not inhibit the constitutive autophagy in the RNAi-AtTOR lines, indicating that AtTOR is either downstream of or in a parallel pathway to NADPH oxidase. Conclusions/Significance: Together, our results provide evidence that TOR is a negative regulator of autophagy in plants.
Comments

This article is from PloS ONE 5 (2010): e11883, doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0011883. Posted with permission.

Rights
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Copyright Owner
Liu, Bassham
Language
en
File Format
application/pdf
Citation Information
Yimo Liu and Diane C. Bassham. "TOR Is a Negative Regulator of Autophagy in Arabidopsis thaliana" PloS ONE Vol. 5 Iss. 7 (2010) p. e11883
Available at: http://works.bepress.com/diane-bassham/15/