Candidate Genes for Freezing and Drought Tolerance Selected on the Basis of Proteome Analysis in Doubled Haploid Lines of Barley.

Magdalena Wójcik-Jagła,Agnieszka Ostrowska,Marcin Rapacz,Anna Nowicka,Sabina Malaga,Monika Krzewska,Ewa Dubas,Iwona Żur,Przemysław Kopeć

doi:10.3390/ijms21062062

Abstract

Plant tolerance to environmental stress is determined by a very complicated network composed of many intra- and extracellular factors. The aim of this study was to select candidate genes involved in responses to freezing and drought in barley on the basis of previous proteomic studies and to analyze changes in their expression caused by application of both stress factors. Six candidate genes for freezing tolerance (namely the genes encoding elongation factor 1 alpha (EF1A), ferredoxin-NADP reductase, a 14-3-3a protein, β-fructofuranosidase, CBF2A and CBF4B) and six for drought tolerance (encoding transketolase, periplasmic serine protease, triosephosphate isomerase, a protein with a co-chaperon region (GroEs), pfam14200 and actin) were chosen arbitrarily on the basis of in silico bioinformatic analyses. The expression levels of these genes were measured under control and stress conditions in six DH (doubled haploid) lines with differing freezing and drought tolerance. The results of gene expression analysis confirmed the roles of the candidate genes preselected in this study on the basis of previous proteome analysis in contributing to the differences in freezing and drought tolerance observed in the studied population of DH lines of winter barley.

Highlights

Plant tolerance to environmental stress is determined by a very complicated network composed of many intra- and extracellular factors
Candidate gene selection on the basis of proteomic analyses which we present in this study is a rare approach to searching for novel genes possibly involved in complex and quantitative traits, and is the reverse of the methods described above
The proteins most likely involved in cold hardening included EPS62279.1, KQJ82088.1, EMT12632.1, EMT33607.1 (hypothetical protein F775_43926 elongation factor (EF) Tu), KQK13608.1 and XP_013654063.1 while the proteins potentially involved in drought

Summary

Introduction

Plant tolerance to environmental stress is determined by a very complicated network composed of many intra- and extracellular factors. Candidate gene selection on the basis of proteomic analyses which we present in this study is a rare approach to searching for novel genes possibly involved in complex and quantitative traits, and is the reverse of the methods described above. This approach is justified as the distance from a transcript to an active protein is long and many data have demonstrated substantial roles for post-transcriptional and translational processes as well as protein degradation in final protein abundances [7]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Conclusion