Abstract
BackgroundDrought stress has great negative effects on the plant growth and development. The tolerance of plants to such abiotic stress is triggered by complicated and multilayered signaling pathways to restore cellular homeostasis and to promote survival. The WRKY family is one of the largest transcription factor families in higher plants, and has been well recognized for the roles in regulating plants tolerance to abiotic and biotic stress. However, little is known about how the WRKY genes regulate drought resistance in cotton.ResultsIn this work, we identified the WRKY transcription factor GhWRKY1-like from upland cotton as a positive regulator of tolerance to drought that directly manipulates abscisic acid (ABA) biosynthesis. Overexpression of GhWRKY1-like in Arabidopsis constitutively activated ABA biosynthesis genes, signaling genes, responsive genes and drought related maker genes, and led to enhanced tolerance to drought. Further analysis has shown that GhWRKY1-like can interact with “W-box” cis-elements of the promoters of AtNCED2, AtNCED5, AtNCED6 and AtNCED9 which are essential enzymes for ABA biosynthesis, and promotes the expression of those target genes.ConclusionsIn summary, our findings suggest that GhWRKY1-like may act as a positive regulator in Arabidopsis tolerance to drought via directly interacting with the promoters of AtNCED2, AtNCED5, AtNCED6 and AtNCED9 to promote ABA biosynthesis.
Highlights
Drought stress has great negative effects on the plant growth and development
The GhWRKY1-like gene contains a complete open reading frame (ORF) of 1215 bp that encodes a protein with 404 amino acids
Phylogenetic analysis performed with the AtWRKY1 protein sequences showed that the closest orthologs of GhWRKY1-like is AtWRKY1, and belongs to group I WRKY transcription factor (Fig. 1)
Summary
The tolerance of plants to such abiotic stress is triggered by complicated and multilayered signaling pathways to restore cellular homeostasis and to promote survival. The WRKY family is one of the largest transcription factor families in higher plants, and has been well recognized for the roles in regulating plants tolerance to abiotic and biotic stress. Little is known about how the WRKY genes regulate drought resistance in cotton. Drought is a major factor restricting plant growth, survival and yield all over the world [3, 4]. The plant hormone abscisic acid (ABA) is known as an essential phytohormone that positive regulates plant cellular adaptation to drought [8]. The ABA perception and signaling transduction consist of three families of proteins, including ABA receptors
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