Mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase 3 regulates seed dormancy in barley

S Nakamura; M Pourkheirandish; H Morishige; Y Kubo; M Nakamura; K Ichimura; S Seo; H Kanamori; J Wu; T Ando; G Hensel; M Sameri; N Stein; K Sato; T Matsumoto; M Yano; T Komatsuda

Journal article

Mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase 3 regulates seed dormancy in barley

S Nakamura, M Pourkheirandish, H Morishige, Y Kubo, M Nakamura, K Ichimura, S Seo, H Kanamori, J Wu, T Ando, G Hensel, M Sameri, N Stein, K Sato, T Matsumoto, M Yano, T Komatsuda

Current Biology | CELL PRESS | Published : 2016

DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2016.01.024

Abstract

Seed dormancy has fundamental importance in plant survival and crop production; however, the mechanisms regulating dormancy remain unclear [1-3]. Seed dormancy levels generally decrease during domestication to ensure that crops successfully germinate in the field. However, reduction of seed dormancy can cause devastating losses in cereals like wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) and barley (Hordeum vulgare L.) due to pre-harvest sprouting, the germination of mature seed (grain) on the mother plant when rain occurs before harvest. Understanding the mechanisms of dormancy can facilitate breeding of crop varieties with the appropriate levels of seed dormancy [4-8]. Barley is a model crop [9, 10] and h..

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University of Melbourne Researchers

Mohammad Pourkheirandish Author

Grants

Awarded by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science

Funding Acknowledgements

We thank N. Shibuya (Meiji University) for advice on kinase assay experiments; J. Pohl (IPK) for screening TILLING mutants; H. Sasaki (NIAS) and S. Mori (NIAS) for sequence assembly; J.L. Molina-Cano (IRTA) for providing us Triumph grains; J. Valkoun (ICARDA) for providing us grains of the wild barley accessions; F. Abe (NICS) and Y. Nagamura (NIAS) for supporting our experiments; and R.R. Finkelstein (UCSB) and Y. Ogihara (Kihara Institute for Biological Research) for critical reading of the manuscript. Part of barley accessions was provided by the Institute of Plant Science and Resources, Okayama University, with support in part by the National Bio-Resource Project of MEXT, Japan. This research was financially supported by a grant from the Japanese Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (Genomics for Agricultural Innovation, TRC-1002, TRG-1002, and Genomics based Technology for Agriculture Improvement, TRS-1001).