Chinese Bulletin of Botany ›› 2018, Vol. 53 ›› Issue (1): 42-50.DOI: 10.11983/CBB17058

• EXPERIMENTAL COMMUNICATIONS • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Histone Chaperone AtHIRA is Involved in Somatic Homologous Recombination and Salinity Response in Arabidopsis

Cheng Chen1,2, Aiwu Dong1,2, Wei Su1,2,*()   

  1. 1College of Life Sciences, Fudan University, Shanghai 200438, China
    2Department of Biochemistry, Fudan University, Shanghai 200438, China
  • Received:2017-03-22 Accepted:2017-08-30 Online:2018-01-01 Published:2018-08-10
  • Contact: Wei Su

Abstract: Histone regulator (HIRA) is a specific chaperone for histone H3.3 and plays an important role in the incorporation of histone H3.3 into chromatin. HIRA is indispensable in mammalian embryo development and DNA damage repair process, but we have few studies of the function of an HIRA homolog in plants. Here, we studied the function of Arabidopsis thaliana AtHIRA in somatic homologous recombination (HR) and meiotic homologous recombination. We used the somatic HR system and the meiotic homologous recombination system in wild type and the hira-1 mutant, a loss- of-function mutant of AtHIRA. Both intramolecular and intermolecular HR frequency was lower in hira-1 than the wild type under normal growth conditions and under bleomycin or UV-C treatment, with no significant difference in the frequency of meiotic recombination of microsporocytes between the wild type and hira-1 mutant under normal growth conditions. As well, under normal growth conditions or bleomycin treatment, loss-of-function of AtHIRA in Arabidopsis did not affect the DNA damage level. On qRT-PCR, the expression of RAD51 and RAD54, two DNA repair-related genes, was higher in hira-1 than the wild type. In addition, hira-1 had a salt-sensitive phenotype as compared with the wild type under salt stress. AtHIRA may play a role in somatic HR and the salinity response in Arabidopsis.

Key words: HIRA, homologous recombination, DNA damage repair, meiotic, salt stress