Recognizing Plant Cell authors: Mengna Zhuo

Mengna Zhuo, first author of A Jasmonate-activated MYC2-Dof2.1-MYC2 Transcriptional Loop Promotes Leaf Senescence in Arabidopsis

Current Position: PhD student, Biotechnology Research Center, The University of Tokyo, Japan

Education: M.Sc. in Agriculture, The University of Tokyo, Japan; B.Sc. in Veterinary Medicine, Zhejiang University, China

Non-scientific Interests: Watching movies

Brief bio: I am interested in how plants regulate plant-specific events, such as flowering, leaf coloring, and leaf abscission. Thus, I started the study of plant science in Prof. Shuichi Yanagisawa’s laboratory since 2017. During my master course, I focused on the roles of Dof (DNA-binding with one finger) proteins, which are plant-specific transcription factors. In the current paper, we showed a novel role of Dof proteins. An Arabidopsis protein Dof2.1 enhanced jasmonate (JA)-induced leaf senescence by directly activating the MYC2 promoter. MYC2 was also identified as a transcriptional activator responsible for JA-inducible expression of Dof2.1. Based on these results, we proposed that Dof2.1 acts as an enhancer of JA-induced leaf senescence through the MYC2-Dof2.1-MYC2 feedforward transcriptional loop. This finding provides new insight into the regulatory mechanism underlying the induction of MYC2 expression for JA responses.