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Molecular Plant Advance Access published online on May 7, 2009
Molecular Plant, doi:10.1093/mp/ssp014
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© The Author 2009. Published by the Molecular Plant Shanghai Editorial Office in association with Oxford University Press on behalf of CSPP and IPPE, SIBS, CAS.

Control of PHERES1 Imprinting in Arabidopsis by Direct Tandem Repeats

Corina Belle R. Villar, Aleksandra Erilova, Grigory Makarevich, Raphael Trösch and Claudia Köhler1

Department of Biology and Zurich-Basel Plant Science Center, Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, ETH Centre, CH-8092 Zurich, Switzerland

1 To whom correspondence should be addressed. E-mail koehlerc{at}ethz.ch, tel. ++41 44 632 5959.

Genomic imprinting is an epigenetic phenomenon that causes monoallelic expression of specific genes dependent on the parent-of-origin. Imprinting of the Arabidopsis gene PHERES1 requires the function of the FERTILIZATION INDEPENDENT SEED (FIS) Polycomb group complex as well as a distally located methylated region containing a tandem triple repeat sequence. In this study, we investigated the regulation of the close PHERES1 homolog PHERES2. We found that PHERES2 is also a direct target gene of the FIS Polycomb group complex, but, in contrast to PHERES1, PHERES2 is equally expressed from maternal and paternal alleles. Thus, PHERES2 is not regulated by genomic imprinting, correlating with the lack of tandem repeats at PHERES2. Eliminating tandem repeats from the PHERES1 locus abolishes PHERES1 imprinting, demonstrating that tandem repeats are essential for PHERES1 imprinting. Taking these results together, our study shows that the recently duplicated genes PHERES1 and PHERES2 are both target genes of the FIS Polycomb group complex but only PHERES1 is regulated by genomic imprinting, which is likely caused by the presence of repeat sequences in the proximity of the PHERES1 locus.

Key Words: Chromatin structure and remodeling • epigenetics • gene regulation • gene silencing • gametogenesis and fertilization


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