Control of final seed and organ size by the DA1 gene family in Arabidopsis thaliana

Yunhai Li; Leiying Zheng; Fiona Corke; Caroline Smith; Michael W. Bevan

doi:10.1101/gad.463608

Control of final seed and organ size by the DA1 gene family in Arabidopsis thaliana

¹ Department of Cell and Developmental Biology, John Innes Centre, Norwich NR4 7UH, United Kingdom;
² The State Key Laboratory of Plant Cell and Chromosome Engineering, Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing 100101, China

Abstract

Although the size of an organism is a defining feature, little is known about the mechanisms that set the final size of organs and whole organisms. Here we describe Arabidopsis DA1, encoding a predicted ubiquitin receptor, which sets final seed and organ size by restricting the period of cell proliferation. The mutant protein encoded by the da1-1 allele has a negative activity toward DA1 and a DA1-related (DAR) protein, and overexpression of a da1-1 cDNA dramatically increases seed and organ size of wild-type plants, identifying this small gene family as important regulators of seed and organ size in plants.

Keywords

Footnotes

↵3 Corresponding authors.

↵3 E-MAIL michael.bevan{at}bbsrc.ac.uk; FAX 44-01603-450025.
↵4 E-MAIL yhli{at}genetics.ac.cn; FAX 86-10-64854467.
Supplemental material is available at http://www.genesdev.org.
Article is online at http://www.genesdev.org/cgi/doi/10.1101/gad.463608.
- Received November 13, 2007.
- Accepted March 17, 2008.