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Brassinosteroid signal transduction from cell-surface receptor kinases to nuclear transcription factors

Nature Cell Biology volume 11, pages 1254–1260 (2009)Cite this article

Abstract

Brassinosteroid (BR) regulates gene expression and plant development through a receptor kinase-mediated signal transduction pathway1. Despite the identification of many components of this pathway, it remains unclear how the BR signal is transduced from the cell surface to the nucleus2. Here we describe a complete BR signalling pathway by elucidating key missing steps. We show that phosphorylation of BSK1 (BR-signalling kinase 1) by the BR receptor kinase BRI1 (BR-insensitive 1) promotes BSK1 binding to the BSU1 (BRI1 suppressor 1) phosphatase, and BSU1 inactivates the GSK3-like kinase BIN2 (BR-insensitive 2) by dephosphorylating a conserved phospho-tyrosine residue (pTyr 200). Mutations that affect phosphorylation/dephosphorylation of BIN2 pTyr200 (bin2-1, bin2-Y200F and quadruple loss-of-function of BSU1-related phosphatases) support an essential role for BSU1-mediated BIN2 dephosphorylation in BR-dependent plant growth. These results demonstrate direct sequential BR activation of BRI1, BSK1 and BSU1, and inactivation of BIN2, leading to accumulation of unphosphorylated BZR (brassinazole resistant) transcription factors in the nucleus. This study establishes a fully connected BR signalling pathway and provides new insights into the mechanism of GSK3 regulation.

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Figure 1: BSU1 directly inhibits BIN2 phosphorylation of BZR1.
Figure 2: BSU1 regulates BIN2 but not bin2-1 in vivo.
Figure 3: BSU1 dephosphorylates pTyr 200 of BIN2 but not bin2-1.
Figure 4: Regulation of the BIN2 homologue AtSK12 by BSU1-mediated Tyr dephosphorylation.
Figure 5: BSK1 directly interacts with BSU1.

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Acknowledgements

We thank J. Chory for providing the bsu1-D seeds and BSU1 cDNA clone and D. Bhaya and K. Barton for comments on the manuscript. Research was supported by grants from NIH (R01GM066258), the National Science Foundation (0724688), the US Department of Energy (DE-FG02-08ER15973) and the Herman Frasch Foundation. The UCSF Mass Spectrometry Facility is supported by the Biomedical Research Technology Program of the National Center for Research Resources, NIH NCRR (RR01614, RR012961 and RR019934).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Plant Biology, Carnegie Institution for Science, Stanford, 94305, CA, USA

    Tae-Wuk Kim, Yu Sun, Zhiping Deng, Wenqiang Tang & Zhi-Yong Wang

  2. Department of Pharmaceutical Chemistry, University of California, San Francisco, 94143, CA, USA

    Shenheng Guan & Alma L. Burlingame

  3. Institute of Molecular Cell Biology, Hebei Normal University, Shijiazhuang, 050016, Hebei, China

    Jian-Xiu Shang & Ying Sun

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Contributions

S.G. and A.L.B. carried out LC-MS/MS analysis. Y.S.1 and Z.D. were involved in 2D PAGE immunoblotting. J.X.S. and Y.S.3 developed BIN2 antiserum. W.T. generated GST–BSK1 proteins. T.W.K. performed all other experiments. T.W.K and Z.W. designed the experiments, analysed data and wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Zhi-Yong Wang.

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Kim, TW., Guan, S., Sun, Y. et al. Brassinosteroid signal transduction from cell-surface receptor kinases to nuclear transcription factors. Nat Cell Biol 11, 1254–1260 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1038/ncb1970

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