Elongator Plays a Positive Role in Exogenous NAD-Induced Defense Responses in Arabidopsis

Abstract

Extracellular NAD is emerging as an important signal molecule in animal cells, but its role in plants has not been well-established. Although it has been shown that exogenous NAD+ activates defense responses in Arabidopsis, components in the exogenous NAD+-activated defense pathway remain to be fully discovered. In a genetic screen for mutants insensitive to exogenous NAD+ (ien), we isolated a mutant named ien2. Map-based cloning revealed that IEN2 encodes ELONGATA3 (ELO3)/AtELP3, a subunit of the Arabidopsis Elongator complex, which functions in multiple biological processes, including histone modification, DNA (de)methylation, and transfer RNA modification. Mutations in the ELO3/AtELP3 gene compromise exogenous NAD+-induced expression of pathogenesis-related (PR) genes and resistance to the bacterial pathogen Pseudomonas syringae pv. maculicola ES4326, and transgenic expression of the coding region of ELO3/AtELP3 in elo3/Atelp3 restores NAD+ responsiveness to the mutant plants, demonstrating that ELO3/AtELP3 is required for exogenous NAD+-induced defense responses. Furthermore, mutations in genes encoding the other five Arabidopsis Elongator subunits (ELO2/AtELP1, AtELP2, ELO1/AtELP4, AtELP5, and AtELP6) also compromise exogenous NAD+-induced PR gene expression and resistance to P. syringae pv. maculicola ES4326. These results indicate that the Elongator complex functions as a whole in exogenous NAD+-activated defense signaling in Arabidopsis.