Impaired strigolactone biosynthesis and signalling are associated with promoter-associated CHH hypermethylation in Arabidopsis thaliana.

Authors

Agnieszka Brąszewska, Marek Marzec

Published in

Journal of applied genetics. Jul 21, 2026. Epub Jul 21, 2026.

Abstract

Strigolactones are plant hormones that regulate diverse developmental processes and stress responses, but their potential role in epigenetic regulation remains poorly understood. Previous transcriptomic analyses of strigolactone mutants in various species revealed extensive transcriptional reprogramming, suggesting destabilisation of higher-order regulatory mechanisms rather than changes in discrete gene networks. Here, we investigated whether disruption in strigolactone biosynthesis or perception is associated with altered DNA methylation patterns. Whole-genome bisulfite sequencing was performed on 7-day-old seedlings of Arabidopsis thaliana wild-type and the strigolactone biosynthesis mutant max3 and the perception mutant d14. A comparative analysis identified differentially methylated regions in CG, CHG, and CHH sequence contexts. While CG methylation changes showed no directional bias, non-CG contexts exhibited a pronounced enrichment of hypermethylated regions in both mutants, with the strongest effect observed in the CHH context. CHH hypermethylation was preferentially enriched at promoter-associated regions, primarily overlapping non-coding and pseudogene loci and showed substantial overlap between max3 and d14, indicating a shared epigenetic response in both mutants. Gene-body-associated regions displayed a similar but weaker pattern. These results demonstrate that impairment of the strigolactone pathway is consistently associated with selective CHH hypermethylation rather than global methylation changes. Because CHH methylation in plants is commonly associated with RNA-directed DNA methylation, the observed pattern is consistent with altered RdDM-associated regulation; however, direct involvement of the RdDM machinery remains to be established. This study provides a genome-wide framework for exploring how strigolactones may be associated with epigenetic regulation in plants.

PMID:
42479415
Bibliographic data and abstract were imported from PubMed on 21 Jul 2026.

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