Abstract
Peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) is an important oil and food legume crop grown in tropical and subtropical areas of the world. As a geocarpic crop, it is affected by many soil-borne diseases and pathogens. The pericarp, an inedible part of the seed, acts as the first layer of defense against biotic and abiotic stresses. Pericarp promoters could drive the defense-related genes specific expression in pericarp for the defense application. Here, we identified a pericarp-abundant promoter (AhGLP17-1P) through microarray and transcriptome analysis. Besides the core promoter elements, several other important cis-elements were identified using online promoter analysis tools. Semiquantitative and qRT-PCR analyses validated that the AhGLP17-1 gene was specifically expressed only in the pericarp, and no expression was detected in leaves, stem, roots, flowers, gynophore/peg, testa, and embryo in peanut. Transgenic Arabidopsis plants showed strong GUS expression in siliques, while GUS staining was almost absent in remaining tissues, including roots, seedlings, leaf, stem, flowers, cotyledons, embryo, and seed coat confirmed its peanut expressions. Quantitative expression of the GUS gene also supported the GUS staining results. The results strongly suggest that this promoter can drive foreign genes’ expression in a pericarp-abundant manner. This is the first study on the functional characterization of the pericarp-abundant promoters in peanut. The results could provide practical significance to improve the resistance of peanut, and other crops for seed protection uses.
Highlights
Peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.), known as groundnut, is an important legume crop (Fabaceae family) that is mainly cultivated for its edible seeds
We studied the promoter of a peanut pericarp abundant expression gene belonging to the Germin-like protein (GLPs) family
Arabidopsis plants were germinated on MS medium (Murashige and Skoog, 1962), transferred into 8-cm diameter plastic pots containing compost after 2 weeks, and further grown in the greenhouse, where 25°C temperature and 16/8 h photoperiod for day/night cycle was maintained for Arabidopsis seedlings
Summary
Peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.), known as groundnut, is an important legume crop (Fabaceae family) that is mainly cultivated for its edible seeds. Peanut is a legume, but it is frequently eaten as a “nut”, and its nutritional value is comparable to other nuts (Settaluri et al, 2012). It is a major nutrition source for humanity, providing edible oil and proteins (Khan et al, 2020) after soybean and rapeseeds. Peanut is widely cultivated globally in tropical and subtropical regions, producing 48.75 million tons of shells annually. China is the leading producer with 17.52 million tons of shells and shares 36% of the Worlds’ total production, followed by India (14%), Nigeria, Sudan, and the USA (FAOSTAT, 2019)
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