Transcriptional profiling of Arabidopsis seedlings 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 concentration-sensitive readouts of PSK signaling. Overall design: To further explore transcriptional readouts of PSK, we did RNA-seq of tpst mutant treated with PSK peptide. We grew tpst mutant for 7 days in liquid MS medium and treated with 100 nM or 1 uM PSK for 5 hours; we also included non-treated wild type Col-0 and tpst mutant as control. Whole seedlings were profiled to gain dose-affected response to PSK at seedling level. Gene expression data obatined from RNA-seq at different concentrations were compared to non-treated control.