Multifaceted roles of WRKY transcription factors in abiotic stress and flavonoid biosynthesis

Jinnan Zhang; Haiqing Zhao; Lu Chen; Jiacheng Lin; Zhile Wang; Jiaqi Pan; Fan Yang; Xiaoli Ni; Yiang Wang; Yuhua Wang; Rui Li; Erxu Pi; Shang Wang

doi:10.3389/fpls.2023.1303667

Multifaceted roles of WRKY transcription factors in abiotic stress and flavonoid biosynthesis

Front Plant Sci. 2023 Dec 15:14:1303667. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2023.1303667. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Jinnan Zhang¹, Haiqing Zhao¹, Lu Chen¹, Jiacheng Lin¹, Zhile Wang¹, Jiaqi Pan¹, Fan Yang¹, Xiaoli Ni¹, Yiang Wang¹, Yuhua Wang¹, Rui Li¹, Erxu Pi¹, Shang Wang¹

Affiliation

¹ College of Life and Environmental Sciences, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, China.

Abstract

Increasing biotic and abiotic stresses are seriously impeding the growth and yield of staple crops and threatening global food security. As one of the largest classes of regulators in vascular plants, WRKY transcription factors play critical roles governing flavonoid biosynthesis during stress responses. By binding major W-box cis-elements (TGACCA/T) in target promoters, WRKYs modulate diverse signaling pathways. In this review, we optimized existing WRKY phylogenetic trees by incorporating additional plant species with WRKY proteins implicated in stress tolerance and flavonoid regulation. Based on the improved frameworks and documented results, we aim to deduce unifying themes of distinct WRKY subfamilies governing specific stress responses and flavonoid metabolism. These analyses will generate experimentally testable hypotheses regarding the putative functions of uncharacterized WRKY homologs in tuning flavonoid accumulation to enhance stress resilience.

Keywords: WRKY family; abiotic stresses; cis-elements; flavonoids biosynthesis; transcription factor.

Publication types

Review

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was supported by grants from the National Science Foundation of China (grant no. 31970286), the Natural Science Foundation of Zhejiang Province (grants no. LY22C020001 and HZSZ24C010001), A Project Supported by Scientific Research Fund of Zhejiang Provincial Education Department (grant no. Y202351641).