Abstract
BackgroundAdaptation to abiotic stresses is crucial for the survival of perennial plants in a natural environment. However, very little is known about the underlying mechanisms. Here, we adopted a liquid culture system to investigate plant adaptation to repeated salt stress in Populus trees.ResultsWe first evaluated phenotypic responses and found that plants exhibit better stress tolerance after pre-treatment of salt stress. Time-course RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) was then performed to profile changes in gene expression over 12 h of salt treatments. Analysis of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) indicated that significant transcriptional reprogramming and adaptation to repeated salt treatment occurred. Clustering analysis identified two modules of co-expressed genes that were potentially critical for repeated salt stress adaptation, and one key module for salt stress response in general. Gene Ontology (GO) enrichment analysis identified pathways including hormone signaling, cell wall biosynthesis and modification, negative regulation of growth, and epigenetic regulation to be highly enriched in these gene modules.ConclusionsThis study illustrates phenotypic and transcriptional adaptation of Populus trees to salt stress, revealing novel gene modules which are potentially critical for responding and adapting to salt stress.
Highlights
Adaptation to abiotic stresses is crucial for the survival of perennial plants in a natural environment
Genes functioning in responses to plant hormone gibberellins (GA), brassinosteroid (BR), and ethylene (ET) are enriched in the green module. These results indicate that plant hormones, especially auxin may be critical for plant adaptation to repeated salt stress while abscisic acid (ABA), salicylic acid (SA), and Jasmonic acid (JA) are essential for plant responses but not sufficient for plant adaptation to each salt stress
In this study, we reported that Populus plants could adapt to salt stress quickly in both physiological and transcriptional levels
Summary
Adaptation to abiotic stresses is crucial for the survival of perennial plants in a natural environment. Adaptation to various abiotic stresses is critical for the survival and biomass accumulation of sessile plants and is true for perennial tree species due to their relatively long-life cycle. A model tree species due to the availability of a near complete set of experimental resources such as easy propagation, transformation methods, and abundance of genetic and genomic materials [1, 2], provides an ideal system to uncover how perennial trees adapt to abiotic stresses. It is possible to identify key gene modules, hub genes or infer the hierarchical structure of the regulatory network using this kind of time-series expression data [16,17,18,19,20,21,22,23], and provide a better overview of how underlying biological processes are regulated
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