Comprehensive analysis suggests overlapping expression of rice ONAC transcription factors in abiotic and biotic stress responses.

Lijun Sun,Huijuan Zhang,Dayong Li,Lei Huang,Yongbo Hong,Fengming Song

doi:10.3390/ijms16024306

Abstract

NAC (NAM/ATAF/CUC) transcription factors comprise a large plant-specific gene family that contains more than 149 members in rice. Extensive studies have revealed that NAC transcription factors not only play important roles in plant growth and development, but also have functions in regulation of responses to biotic and abiotic stresses. However, biological functions for most of the members in the NAC family remain unknown. In this study, microarray data analyses revealed that a total of 63 ONAC genes exhibited overlapping expression patterns in rice under various abiotic (salt, drought, and cold) and biotic (infection by fungal, bacterial, viral pathogens, and parasitic plants) stresses. Thirty-eight ONAC genes exhibited overlapping expression in response to any two abiotic stresses, among which 16 of 30 selected ONAC genes were upregulated in response to exogenous ABA. Sixty-five ONAC genes showed overlapping expression patterns in response to any two biotic stresses. Results from the present study suggested that members of the ONAC genes with overlapping expression pattern may have pleiotropic biological functions in regulation of defense response against different abiotic and biotic stresses, which provide clues for further functional analysis of the ONAC genes in stress tolerance and pathogen resistance.

Highlights

Plants are always subject to various types of abiotic and biotic stresses under variable environmental conditions, and have developed a series of mechanisms at physiological, biochemical, and molecular levels to combat these stresses [1,2,3,4,5]
Differential expression of the ONAC genes in rice seedlings treated with different abiotic stresses such as salinity, drought, and cold conditions were analyzed by comparison with mock-treated seedlings
Further analysis of the overlapping expression patterns identified a total of 38 ONAC genes that were differentially expressed under at least two abiotic stress conditions based on analysis of microarray data GSE6901

Summary

Introduction

Plants are always subject to various types of abiotic (e.g., high-salinity, drought, and cold) and biotic (infection by fungal, bacterial and viral pathogens, and infestation by herbivores and parasitic plants) stresses under variable environmental conditions, and have developed a series of mechanisms at physiological, biochemical, and molecular levels to combat these stresses [1,2,3,4,5]. In response to abiotic and biotic stresses, plants often activate a battery of defense responses that include inducible expression of a set of stress-related genes, which are regulated directly or indirectly by different types of transcription factors. Previous studies have showed that dozens of transcription factors belonging to the ERF, MYB, WRKY, and bZIP families are involved in regulation of plant stress responses [6,7,8,9]. The members of the NAC gene family have been demonstrated to play important roles in diverse biological processes of plant growth and development, e.g., cell wall biosynthesis and senescence (for reviews, see [19,20])

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion