Overexpression of a Novel Arabidopsis Gene Related to Putative Zinc-Transporter Genes from Animals Can Lead to Enhanced Zinc Resistance and Accumulation

We describe the isolation of an Arabidopsis gene that is closely related to the animal ZnT genes (Zn transporter). The protein encoded by the ZAT (Zn transporter of Arabidopsis thaliana) gene has 398 amino acid residues and is predicted to have six membrane-spanning domains. To obtain evidence for the postulated function of the Arabidopsis gene, transgenic plants with the ZAT coding sequence under control of the cauliflower mosaic virus 35S promoter were analyzed. Plants obtained with ZAT in the sense orientation exhibited enhanced Zn resistance and strongly increased Zn content in the roots under high Zn exposure. Antisense mRNA-producing plants were viable, with a wild-type level of Zn resistance and content, like plants expressing a truncated coding sequence lacking the C-terminal cytoplasmic domain of the protein. The availability of ZAT can lead to a better understanding of the mechanism of Zn homeostasis and resistance in plants.Several heavy metals are essential during plant growth and development, but their excess can easily lead to toxic effects. Contamination of soils with heavy metals, either by natural causes or due to pollution, often has pronounced effects on the vegetation, resulting in the appearance of metallophytes, heavy-metal-tolerant plants. The precise mechanisms of uptake, transport, and accumulation of heavy metals in plants are poorly understood, but several genes likely to be involved in these processes have been described. Recently, a family of ZIP genes that are expressed in roots upon Zn deficiency was isolated from Arabidopsis (Grotz et al., 1998). The proteins encoded by the ZIP genes have eight predicted TM regions and a high degree of similarity to the ZRT genes from yeast that are involved in Zn uptake. Expression of the ZIP genes in yeast conferred Zn-uptake activities to these cells, demonstrating that they are probably functional homologs of the yeast ZRT genes (Grotz et al., 1998). The only other metal-transporting protein recently identified in plants belongs to the large family of cation-transporting P-type ATPases (Tabata et al., 1997), but these proteins are structurally very different from the metal-transporting proteins mentioned above.Recent data have provided more insight into the mechanisms of heavy-metal tolerance. Metallophytes often exhibit tolerance to several different heavy metals, but all of these metals need not be present at toxic levels in their habitat (Schat and ten Bookum, 1992a; Schat and Vooijs, 1997, and refs. therein; Schat and Verkleij, 1998). Although such a feature is suggestive of a general mechanism of heavy-metal tolerance, recent genetic evidence has shown that a number of different mechanisms must exist, each with its own metal specificity (Schat and Vooijs, 1997). In Arabidopsis, a plant species with a typical level of tolerance to heavy metals, it has been demonstrated that the Cd-sensitive mutants cad1 and cad2 are defective in the synthesis of the metal-binding compound phytochelatin (Howden et al., 1995). cad1 plants were only slightly more sensitive to Cu and Zn, indicating that phytochelatin-mediated detoxification is not sufficient for Cu and Zn detoxification (Howden et al., 1995b). Metallothioneins appear to be of major importance for constitutive Cu tolerance in Arabidopsis (Zhou and Goldsbrough, 1994).Aside from complexation of heavy metals by heavy-metal-binding proteins, there is evidence that transport-mediated sequestration can contribute to heavy-metal tolerance. In the Zn-tolerant plant Silene vulgaris it was shown that Zn transport across the tonoplast was about 2.5 times higher than in Zn-sensitive plants of the same species (Verkleij et al., 1998). The ZRC1 gene from the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae encodes a protein with six putative TM regions; when overexpressed, this gene confers elevated resistance to Zn and Cd (Kamizono et al., 1989). A structurally very similar gene, COT1, was later found to be involved in Co accumulation in yeast (Conklin et al., 1992).Recently, several genes homologous to ZRC1 and COT1 have been described in mammalian cells. The first gene discovered, ZnT-1 (Zn transporter 1), was cloned by virtue of its ability to complement a mutated, Zn-sensitive cell line (Palmiter and Finley, 1995). Subsequently, ZnT-2 (Palmiter et al., 1996), ZnT-3 (Wenzel et al., 1997), and ZnT-4 (Huang and Gitschier, 1997) have been described. The ZnT-1 protein most likely transports Zn out of the cells (Palmiter and Finley, 1995), whereas ZnT-2 confers Zn resistance by facilitating vesicular sequestration (Palmiter et al., 1996a). Other proteins related to yeast ZRC1/COT1 and mammalian ZnT have been found in several bacteria; for example, the CzcD protein from Alcaligenes eutrophus might be involved in Zn efflux (Nies, 1992).A family of proteins with six TM regions thus seems to be involved in the transport of heavy metals, mostly Zn, thereby conferring enhanced resistance toward these metals. To our knowledge, no plant homologs of this rather widespread gene family have yet been described. In this paper we describe an Arabidopsis cDNA clone encoding a protein closely related to the ZnT family of mammalian Zn transporters, demonstrating that plants do contain these types of genes. Experiments were performed to analyze the functional properties of the gene. We demonstrate that overexpression of the complete protein-coding domain results in enhanced Zn resistance and increased accumulation of Zn in the root. The relevance of these findings is discussed.