Enhancement of ABA Sensitivity Through Conditional Expression of the Gene in Reveals Fertile Plants with Tolerance Against .

Concomitant increase of auxin-responsive factors , along with enhanced expression of in resistant compared with that in susceptible upon challenge with , revealed that abscisic acid (ABA)-auxin crosstalk is a critical factor for resistance response. Here, we induced the ABA response through conditional expression of in using the -inducible promoter. Induced ABA sensitivity caused by conditional expression of ARF10 in transgenic resulted in tolerance against and led to enhanced expression of several ABA-responsive genes without affecting the auxin biosynthetic gene expression. Compared with and , showed maximum upregulation in the most tolerant transgenic lines upon pathogen challenge. Moreover, elevated expression of by different means revealed a direct correlation between ARF10 expression and the induction of ABI5 protein in . Through in vitro DNA-protein experiments and chromosome immunoprecipitation using the ARF10 antibody, we demonstrated that ARF10 interacts with the auxin-responsive elements of the promoter. This suggests that ARF10 may function as a modulator of ABI5 to induce ABA sensitivity and mediate the resistance response against .