Abstract
Phospholipase C (PLC) performs significant functions in a variety of biological processes, including plant growth and development. The PLC family of enzymes principally catalyze the hydrolysis of phospholipids in organisms. This exhaustive exploration of soybean GmPLC members using genome databases resulted in the identification of 15 phosphatidylinositol-specific PLC (GmPI-PLC) and 9 phosphatidylcholine-hydrolyzing PLC (GmNPC) genes. Chromosomal location analysis indicated that GmPLC genes mapped to 10 of the 20 soybean chromosomes. Phylogenetic relationship analysis revealed that GmPLC genes distributed into two groups in soybean, the PI-PLC and NPC groups. The expression patterns and tissue expression analysis showed that GmPLCs were differentially expressed in response to abiotic stresses. GmPI-PLC7 was selected to further explore the role of PLC in soybean response to drought and salt stresses by a series of experiments. Compared with the transgenic empty vector (EV) control lines, over-expression of GmPI-PLC7 (OE) conferred higher drought and salt tolerance in soybean, while the GmPI-PLC7-RNAi (RNAi) lines exhibited the opposite phenotypes. Plant tissue staining and physiological parameters observed from drought- and salt-stressed plants showed that stress increased the contents of chlorophyll, oxygen free radical (O2–), hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and NADH oxidase (NOX) to amounts higher than those observed in non-stressed plants. This study provides new insights in the functional analysis of GmPLC genes in response to abiotic stresses.
Highlights
Plants inhabit widely varying environments and are affected by abiotic and biotic factors such as water, temperature, herbivore attacks and disease threats
The statistical results illustrated that the protein size of 15 GmPIPLC proteins ranged from 376 to 629 amino acids, the isoelectric points varied from 5.70 to 9.45, and the molecular weights (MW) ranged from 42.7 to 70.9 kDa, whereas the protein lengths of nine non-specific phospholipase C (NPC) ranged from 311 to 801 amino acids, the pI varied from 5.23 to 7.78 and the MW ranged from 33.4 to 59.7 kDa
The 15 GmPI-Phospholipase C (PLC) and 9 GmNPCs were named as GmPI-PLC1 to GmPI-PLC15 and GmNPC1 to GmNPC9, respectively, according to their chromosomal locations (Supplementary Table 2)
Summary
Plants inhabit widely varying environments and are affected by abiotic and biotic factors such as water, temperature, herbivore attacks and disease threats. Drought and salt are important factors that affect the production of crops because these two environmental stresses significantly impact plant reproduction. Drought- and salt-stressed soybean, for example, produce fewer pods and seeds. Soybean PLC Genes per plant, and reduce its yield and economically diminish the industrial production of soybeans (Wang et al, 2015a). Crop scientists have become very interested in the study of signal transduction pathways related to plant stress response. A particular focus has been on phospholipase C (PLC) because it is a very important enzyme in signal transduction pathways; many experts and scholars have directed their research on PLCs in association with plant tolerance to stress
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