Inaugural Lectures by Fellows/Associates

The FCS-Like Zinc Finger Proteins Fine-Tune the Nutrient Signaling and Growth and Stress-Response Trade-Offffs in Plants

The antagonistic interaction of The Target Of Rapamycin (TOR) and SNF1-related protein kinase 1 (SnRK1), which are two serinethreonine kinases that originated in eukaryotes, is crucial for the survival of the organisms. These kinases have highly conserved functions across the eukaryotes, but did undergo significant evolutionary innovations for optimization according to the lifestyle of different eukaryotic lineages. The speaker and team have identified a novel class of C2-C2 zinc fingers, which they named FCS-Like Zinc fingers (FLZ). These proteins were found to be physically associating with different subunits of SnRK1 and specifically with RAPTOR, the regulatory subunit of TOR. Molecular analysis of various FLZ genes identified that they are involved in the regulation of protein stability of SnRK1α1, the major kinase subunit of SnRK1. Further, they were also found to be working adaptor proteins bridging TOR and SnRK1 complexes in plants.