TY - JOUR T1 - A group of nuclear factor Y transcription factors are likely sub-functionalized in the endosperm development of monocot JF - bioRxiv DO - 10.1101/149047 SP - 149047 AU - E. Zhiguo AU - Li Tingting AU - Zhang Huaya AU - Liu Zehou AU - Deng Hui AU - Wei Xuefeng AU - Wang Lei AU - Niu Baixiao AU - Chen Chen Y1 - 2017/01/01 UR - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/06/12/149047.abstract N2 - Nuclear factor Y (NF-Y), also known as Heme Activator Protein or CCAAT-binding factor, is a heterotrimeric transcription factor that consists of three subunits, NF-YA, NF-YB, and NF-YC. Although NF-Ys play multiple roles in plant development, their functions during endosperm development are not well understood. In this study, we identified eight rice (Oryza sativa) NF-Y encoding genes, including OsNF-YA8, OsNF-YB1,9, and OsNF-YC8,9,10,11,12, which predominantly express in the endosperm. Interestingly, their closest homologs could only be found in monocot species and these genes also showed an endosperm-preferential expression pattern, which suggest that the phylogenetically related group of NF-Ys may be involved in the regulation of endosperm development. A systemic analysis of the interactions between rice endosperm-preferential NF-Ys in yeast revealed that NF-YBs and NF-YCs could interact with each other in all the combinations that we tested. OsNF-YA8 is a recently evolved NF-YA in rice. NF-YA does not usually interact with NF-YB monomers in plants; however, OsNF-YA8 could interact with OsNF-YB9. Our results also indicated that the endosperm-preferential OsNF-YBs, as well as the OsNF-YCs, could interact with some endosperm-specific ERFs of rice. Unlike the OsNF-YC8,9,10, OsNF-YB1,9 or OsNF-YC11,12 alone lacks transcriptional activation activity. However, the dimers they formed displayed transcriptional activation activities. Considering that mutated OsNF-YB1 can severely impair endosperm development in rice, our findings strongly suggest that there is a group of phylogenetically conserved NF-Ys that have differentiated in monocots to regulate endosperm development. ER -