Effects of formin impairment on gene expression in Arabidopsis seedlings

Formins (FH2 proteins) are a family of evolutionarily conserved proteins involved in many aspects of cytoskeletal organization and signalling, shown in some cases to participate in transcriptional regulation in metazoans. However, nothing is known about their possible involvement in the regulation of gene expression in angiosperms. We examined the effects of mutational loss of the main housekeeping Arabidopsis thaliana formin, FH1 ((At3g25500) on global gene expression pattern in 7 days old seedlings and compared them with the effect of treatment with SMIFH2, a broad-spectrum inhibitor of formin function. Four sets of samples (seedling pools) have been analyzed, each with two biologivcal replicates: wild type (wt) seedlings grown for 7 days on soliud media, fh1-1 mutant seedlings grown for 7 days on solid media, wt seedlings grown for 6 days on solid media and 1 day in liquid media, and wt seedlings grown for 6 days on solid media and 1 day in liquid media in the presence of 20 uM SMIFH2.