Thermotolerance is very important for plant survival when plants are subjected to lethally high temperature. However, thus far little is known about the functions of RING E3 ligase in response to heat shock in plants. This study found that one rice gene encoding the RING finger protein was specifically induced by heat and cold stress treatments but not by salinity or dehydration and named it OsHCI1 (Oryza sativa heat and cold induced 1). Subcellular localization results showed that OsHCI1 was mainly associated with the Golgi apparatus and moved rapidly and extensively along the cytoskeleton. In contrast, OsHCI1 may have accumulated in the nucleus under high temperatures. OsHCI1 physically interacted with nuclear substrate proteins including a basic helix-loop-helix transcription factor. Transient co-overexpression of OsHCI1 and each of three nuclear proteins showed that their fluorescent signals moved into the cytoplasm as punctuate formations. Heterogeneous overexpression of OsHCI1 in Arabidopsis highly increased survival rate through acquired thermotolerance. It is proposed that OsHCI1 mediates nuclear–cytoplasmic trafficking of nuclear substrate proteins via monoubiquitination and drives an inactivation device for the nuclear proteins under heat shock.

Background: The PLAnt co-EXpression database (PLANEX) is a new internet-based database for plant gene analysis. PLANEX (http://planex.plantbioinformatics.org) contains publicly available GeneChip data obtained from the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI). PLANEX is a genome-wide co-expression database, which allows for the functional identification of genes from a wide variety of experimental designs. It can be used for the characterization of genes for functional identification and analysis of a gene’s dependency among other genes. Gene co-expression databases have been developed for other species, but gene co-expression information for plants is currently limited. Description: We constructed PLANEX as a list of co-expressed genes and functional annotations for Arabidopsis thaliana, Glycine max, Hordeum vulgare, Oryza sativa, Solanum lycopersicum, Triticum aestivum, Vitis vinifera and Zea mays. PLANEX reports Pearson’s correlation coefficients (PCCs; r-values) that distribute from a gene of interest for a given microarray platform set corresponding to a particular organism. To support PCCs, PLANEX performs an enrichment test of Gene Ontology terms and Cohen’s Kappa value to compare functional similarity for all genes in the co-expression database. PLANEX draws a cluster network with co-expressed genes, which is estimated using the k-mean method. To construct PLANEX, a variety of datasets were interpreted by the IBM supercomputer Advanced Interactive eXecutive (AIX) in a supercomputing center. Conclusion: PLANEX provides a correlation database, a cluster network and an interpretation of enrichment test results for eight plant species. A typical co-expressed gene generates lists of co-expression data that contain hundreds of genes of interest for enrichment analysis. Also, co-expressed genes can be identified and cataloged in terms of comparative genomics by using the ‘Co-expression gene compare’ feature. This type of analysis will help interpret experimental data and determine whether there is a common term among genes of interest.