Abstract
Maize is the most important crop around the world and it is highly sensitive to abiotic stress caused by drought, excessive salinity, and extreme temperature. In plants, trehalose has been widely studied for its role in plant adaptation to different abiotic stresses such as drought, high and low temperature, and osmotic stress. Thus, the aim of this work was to clone and characterize at molecular level the trehalose-6-phosphate synthase (TPS) and trehalose-6-phosphate phosphatase (TPP) genes from maize and to evaluate its differential expression in maize seedlings under drought stress. To carry out this, resistant and susceptible maize lines were subjected to drought stress during 72 h. Two full-length cDNAs of TPS and one of TPP were cloned and sequenced. Then, TPS and TPP amino acid sequences were aligned with their homologs from different species, showing highly conserved domains and the same catalytic sites. Relative expression of both genes was evaluated by RT-qPCR at different time points. The expression pattern showed significant induction after 0.5 h in resistant lines and after two to four hours in susceptible plants, showing their participation in drought stress response.
Highlights
Temperature fluctuations caused by climate change negatively affect most plants, causing chlorosis, slowing growth, and in extreme cases, plant death; in response to these conditions plants are capable of accumulate various organic compounds, such as soluble sugar and free amino acids known as osmoprotectants
PCR fragments were cloned into pGEM-T Easy, and the plasmids were named as pAP2 and pAP3 for the isoforms of trehalose-6-phosphate synthase (TPS)-2 and TPS-3 and pAP5 for the trehalose-6-phosphate phosphatase (TPP)-1 variant, respectively
The results showed by Wang et al [14] where the expression levels of some TPS genes isolated increased under different types of abiotic stress like chilling, salinity and drought stress in the first three hours
Summary
Temperature fluctuations caused by climate change negatively affect most plants, causing chlorosis, slowing growth, and in extreme cases, plant death; in response to these conditions plants are capable of accumulate various organic compounds, such as soluble sugar and free amino acids known as osmoprotectants. One of these compounds is a sugar named trehalose that can accumulate in amounts up to 12% of dry weight in the cell to keep their integrity [1,2]. Plants 2020, 9, 315 disaccharide formed by two molecules of glucose bound by an α,α-1,1-glucosidic linkage. This yeast, carbohydrate is synthesized invertebrates, green weed, and bacteria, cyanobacteria in many organisms, including yeast,[4,5,6,7]
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