Transcriptional profiling of Arabidopsis shoots and roots responses to phytosulfokine (PSK)

Phytosulfokine (PSK) is a plant peptide hormone that contributes to plant signaling and induced various of effects, including growth, senescence, stress tolerant and defense responses. PSK is a pentapeptide with two tyrosine sulfated by tyrosylprotein sulfotransferase (TPST) enzyme. The sulfated PSK can bind to its cell surface receptors, but the transcriptional readouts remain largely unknown. Here, we treated tpst mutant that are unable to produce native sulfated PSK with synthetic active PSK to capture time-series and tissue-specific readouts of PSK signaling. Overall design: To capture transcriptional readouts of PSK, we did RNA-seq of tpst mutant treated with PSK peptide. We grew tpst mutant for 11 days in liquid MS medium and treated with 10 nM PSK for 30 minutes, 2 hours, 5 hours to gain early response to PSK and for 11 days to gain late response to PSK; we also included non-treated wild type Col-0 and tpst mutant as control. The shoot and roots were profiled separately to explore tissue-specific response to PSK at different time points. Gene expression data obtained from RNA-seq at different time points and from different tissues were compared to non-treated control accordingly.