Investigating the role of BBX proteins in jasmonic acid signaling pathway

Abstract

The BBX proteins belong to a family of transcription factors that, in plants, was initially associated with light-signaling regulation. Today, we know that these proteins are involved in the regulation of many physiological processes such as flowering, photomorphogenesis, stress response and shade avoidance. Recently, evidence has shown that BBX proteins also participate in defense response, particularly in jasmonic acid (JA) signaling. However, there is still little knowledge about BBX proteins functions in the growth-defense trade-off, and the characterizations relies only on studies done with Arabidopsis thaliana model species. Therefore, this project aims to test the hypothesis of the participation of BBX proteins in the crosstalk between JA- and light-signaling in Solanum lycopersicum. Then, we propose to investigate the transcriptional regulation of SlBBXs by JA signaling and vice versa by performing the in silico identification of transcription factors binding motifs and mRNA profiling in response to jasmonic acid and darkness in wild type and selected Slbbx CRISPR-mediated mutant plants.