PHD finger proteins function in plant development and abiotic stress responses: an overview

Wenli Quan; Zhulong Chan; Piwei Wei; Yahui Mao; Dorothea Bartels; Xun Liu

doi:10.3389/fpls.2023.1297607

PHD finger proteins function in plant development and abiotic stress responses: an overview

Front Plant Sci. 2023 Nov 17:14:1297607. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2023.1297607. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Wenli Quan^{1

2}, Zhulong Chan³, Piwei Wei¹, Yahui Mao⁴, Dorothea Bartels², Xun Liu¹

Affiliations

¹ College of Bioengineering, Sichuan University of Science and Engineering, Yibin, China.
² Institute of Molecular Physiology and Biotechnology of Plants (IMBIO), University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany.
³ Key Laboratory of Horticultural Plant Biology, Ministry of Education, Key Laboratory of Urban Agriculture in Central China, Ministry of Agriculture, College of Horticulture and Forestry Sciences, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, China.
⁴ College of Life Science and Technology, Hubei Engineering University, Xiaogan, China.

Abstract

The plant homeodomain (PHD) finger with a conserved Cys4-His-Cys3 motif is a common zinc-binding domain, which is widely present in all eukaryotic genomes. The PHD finger is the "reader" domain of methylation marks in histone H3 and plays a role in the regulation of gene expression patterns. Numerous proteins containing the PHD finger have been found in plants. In this review, we summarize the functional studies on PHD finger proteins in plant growth and development and responses to abiotic stresses in recent years. Some PHD finger proteins, such as VIN3, VILs, and Ehd3, are involved in the regulation of flowering time, while some PHD finger proteins participate in the pollen development, for example, MS, TIP3, and MMD1. Furthermore, other PHD finger proteins regulate the plant tolerance to abiotic stresses, including Alfin1, ALs, and AtSIZ1. Research suggests that PHD finger proteins, as an essential transcription regulator family, play critical roles in various plant biological processes, which is helpful in understanding the molecular mechanisms of novel PHD finger proteins to perform specific function.

Keywords: PHD finger; abiotic stress; methylation; molecular mechanism; plant development; transcription regulator.

Publication types

Review

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. WQ was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 32202727). XL was funded by the Natural Science Foundation of Sichuan Province (No. 2022NSFSC1782) and Sichuan Province Scientific Research Foundation for the Returned Overseas Chinese Scholars (2022).