Abstract
Most higher plants are unable to survive desiccation to an air-dried state. An exception is a small group of vascular angiosperm plants, termed resurrection plants. They have evolved unique mechanisms of desiccation tolerance and thus can tolerate severe water loss, and mostly adjust their water content with the relative humidity in the environment. Desiccation tolerance is a complex phenomenon and depends on the regulated expression of numerous genes during dehydration and subsequent rehydration. Most of the resurrection plants have a large genome and are difficult to transform which makes them unsuitable for genetic approaches. However, technical advances have made it possible to analyze changes in gene expression on a large-scale. These approaches together with comparative studies with non-desiccation tolerant plants provide novel insights into the molecular processes required for desiccation tolerance and will shed light on identification of orphan genes with unknown functions. Here, we review large-scale recent transcriptomic, proteomic, and metabolomic studies that have been performed in desiccation tolerant plants and discuss how these studies contribute to understanding the molecular basis of desiccation tolerance.
Highlights
The sessile nature of plants has endowed them with a wide spectrum of adaptations to combat environmental perturbations
Desiccation tolerance is controlled by many genes or proteins, a systems biology approach combining transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics should be informative to understand the mechanism of desiccation tolerance, and to determine at which level of control the changes are affected
Omics studies in resurrection plants can be done by either qRT-PCR or by gene microarray, the most widely used early approach toward transcriptome analysis was the collection of expressed sequence tags (ESTs) which is limited to a few hundred or thousand sequenced cDNAs
Summary
The sessile nature of plants has endowed them with a wide spectrum of adaptations to combat environmental perturbations. Most of the flowering angiosperm plants are drought sensitive and have relative water contents of around 85–100% under actively growing conditions and do not survive, if the water content falls below 59–30% (Höfler et al, 1941). In this context, Arabidopsis thaliana is considered as a model to study the responses of plants toward tolerating moderate water stress and to study the genes involved in this response. Desiccation tolerance is controlled by many genes or proteins, a systems biology approach combining transcriptomics, proteomics, and metabolomics should be informative to understand the mechanism of desiccation tolerance, and to determine at which level of control the changes are affected.
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