A Novel Group of Transcriptional Repressors in Arabidopsis

We showed previously that the ERF-associated amphiphilic repression (EAR) motif is a plant-specific repression domain that contains the conserved amino acid sequence LXLXL. In this report, we describe the identification of a novel repression domain, L/VR/KLFGVXM/V/L, which is different from known EAR motifs, in B3 DNA-binding domain transcription factors in Arabidopsis. Database analysis revealed that 29 Arabidopsis transcription factors, which included members of the RAV, ARF, Hsf and MYB families, contain the R/KLFGV conserved motif found in the novel repression domain. We demonstrated that factors that contain the R/KLFGV motif, namely, RAV1, RAV2, HsfB1 and HsfB2b, exhibited the repressive activity.