Subcellular localization and functional analyses of structural domains of COP1 in transgenic tobacco

Plants have evolved an extremely exquisite light signal regulatory network to adapt to the changing ambient light conditions, in which COP1 plays a critical role of the light signal transduction. Based on the cloned pea COP1 cDNA sequence and its protein structure, four individual gene fragments encoding different structural domains of the COP1 were designed to fuse to the GFP gene. The plant expression vectors containing these fusion genes as well as the COP1GFP fusion gene were constructed and used to transform tobacco by Agribacterium as confirmed by Southern analyses. Antibodies were raised against the recombinant GFP-COP1 overproduced in Escherichia coli. Immunoblotting results demonstrated that all of the fusion genes were constitutively expressed in transgenic tobacco plants. We systematically investigated the different subcellular localization of these fusion proteins and the resulting phenotypic characteristics of these transgenic plants under light and dark conditions. Our data show that (1) the molecular mass of the tobacco endogenous COP1 protein is 76 kD. It is constitutively expressed in all of the tested tissues and the total cellular content of COP1 protein is not noticeably affected by light conditions. (2) The nuclear localization signal of COP1 plays a critical role in regulation of its nuclear-cytoplasmic partitioning. The subcellular localization of the COP1 protein containing nuclear localization signal is regulated by light in the epidermal cells of leaves, but, it is located in nucleus constitutively in root cells. (3) The coiled-coil domain is very critical to the function of COP1 protein, while the zinc binding RING finger domain only plays a supportive role. (4) The WD-40 repeats domain is essential to the COP1 function, but this domain alone does not affect photomorphogenesis. (5) Overexpression of COP1 protein not only inhibits the photomorphogenesis of the stems and leaves of the transgenic tobacco, but also results in the generation of short and clustered roots. In contrast, overexpression of COP1 protein without WD-40 repeats domain promotes the photomorphogenesis process in the stems and leaves and lead to root elongation and lack of lateral roots. The COP1-COP1 interaction happens not only in the nucleus, but also in cytoplasm.