Arabidopsis O-fucosyltransferase SPINDLY regulates root hair patterning independently of gibberellin signalling

Root hairs are able to sense soil composition and play an important role for water and nutrient uptake. In Arabidopsis thaliana, root hairs are distributed in the epidermis in a specific pattern, regularly alternating with non-root hair cells in continuous cell files. This patterning is regulated by internal factors such as a number of hormones, as well as external factors like nutrient availability. Thus, root-hair patterning is an excellent model for studying the plasticity of cell fate determination in response to environmental changes. Here, we report that loss-of-function mutants in the Protein O-Fucosyltransferase SPINDLY (SPY) form ectopic root hairs. Using a number of transcriptional reporters, we show that patterning in spy-22 is affected upstream of the central regulators GLABRA2 (GL2) and WEREWOLF (WER). O-fucosylation of nuclear and cytosolic proteins is an important post-translational modification that is still not very well understood. So far, SPY is best characterized for its role in gibberellin signalling via fucosylation of the growth-repressing DELLA protein REPRESSOR OF GA (RGA). Our data suggest that the formation of ectopic root hairs in spy-22 is independent of RGA and gibberellin signalling.