Authors
Khan, A., Kusova, A., Skalak, J., Ghosh, B., Yang, T., Kelling, A. L. V., Hagemann, L., Panigrahi, K. C. S., Hejatko, J., Prochazkova Schrumpfova, P., Zhou, Y., Farrona, S., Mozgova, I., Schubert, D.
Abstract
The Arabidopsis PWWP-DOMAIN INTERACTOR OF POLYCOMBS1 (PWO1) and Telomere Repeat-Binding Proteins 1-3 (TRB1-3, TRBs) associate with distinct and shared protein complexes involved in epigenetic regulation, yet their cooperative roles in chromatin control and plant development remain largely unexplored. Here, we show that the interaction between PWO1 and TRBs is evolutionarily conserved. Both PWO1 and TRBs associate with plant telomeres, interact at these regions, and are co-enriched at subsets of interspersed telo-box motifs across regulatory regions genome-wide. TRBs facilitate PWO1 binding at shared genomic regions, including telo-box motifs. PWO1 and TRBs share a substantial number of genomic targets and preferentially bind chromatin regions associated with transcriptionally active states, whereas TRBs alone associate with repressive marks at thousands of loci. Genetic analyses show that the pwo1 trb1 trb3 triple mutant displays severe developmental defects, including main stem arrest and early maturation associated with aberrant lignin deposition in interfascicular tissues. In the triple mutant, key enzymes in the lignin biosynthesis pathway are upregulated, indicating that PWO1, TRB1, and TRB3 cooperatively regulate secondary cell wall formation. Together, our findings provide new insights into how PWO1 and TRBs cooperate to regulate chromatin states and orchestrate plant development, highlighting their central role in controlling gene expression programs.
Preprint server:
bioRxiv
The authors list and abstract were imported from bioRxiv on 28 Jul 2026.
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