Fei Yu
College of Life Sciences, Northwest A&F University

Plant dwarfism is an agronomic trait that has great potentials for agricultural applications. We are interested in utilizing Arabidopsis thaliana as the model system to investigate the functions of agronomic traits-related genes. In our previous work, we isolated a dominant dwarf mutant designated abs1-1D from our Arabidopsis T-DNA activation tagging mutant library. We showed that the overexpression of a novel BAHD family acyl transferase gene ABS1 is the cause for the dwarf phenotype in abs1-1D. The overexpression of ABS1 shows many phenotypic features of brassinosteroid (BR) deficient mutants and we show that the application of BR can rescue the dwarf phenotype of abs1-1D. Double mutant of abs1-1D and det2, which is defective in BR synthesis, shows a synergistic interaction. Our work will provide new insights and gene resources for better manipulation of crop architecture.