Drought stress restricts plant growth and development. To cope with drought stress, abscisic acid (ABA) accumulates in plants. Although ABA-dependent drought tolerance pathways have been widely investigated, it remains largely unknown how the feedback mechanisms work and the negative regulatory roles within these pathways. Here we characterize the roles of a C2H2 transcription factor, ZFP8, whose expression is repressed by ABA in the tolerance of drought stress. ZFP8 overexpressing plants were hyposensitive to ABA and exhibited less dehydration-tolerance while ABA or drought induced marker genes were higher expressed in zfp8, suggesting that ZFP8 functions as a negative regulator in ABA mediated drought response. The further transcriptome assay showed that ZFP8 positively regulates genes expression for cellular function and negatively regulates hormone and stress response genes expression. Besides, we found that ZFP8 can interact with ABF2, one of the basic leucine zipper (bZIP) family transcription factor members, to inhibit its transcription activity. In conclusion, our results demonstrated a novel negative regulation pathway of ZFP8, which contributes to plants\u2019 ability to fine-tune their drought responses.
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