Group 3 LEA Protein, ZmLEA3, Is Involved in Protection from Low Temperature Stress.

Yang Liu,Dequan Li,Xinghong Yang,Liping Sun,Jianan Liang

doi:10.3389/fpls.2016.01011

Abstract

Late embryogenesis abundant (LEA) proteins are a family of small highly hydrophilic proteins that accumulate at the onset of seed desiccation and in response to adverse conditions such as drought, salinity, low temperature, or water deficit. In previous studies, we demonstrated that ZmLEA3 could enhance the transgenic tobacco tolerance to osmotic and oxidative stresses. Here, we demonstrated that the transcription of ZmLEA3 in the maize stems could be significantly induced by low temperature and osmotic stresses and by treatment with abscisic acid (ABA) and H2O2. Further study indicated that ZmLEA3 is a single copy gene in the maize genome. The ZmLEA3 protein could protect lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) activity at low temperatures. The overexpression of ZmLEA3 conferred tolerance to low-temperature stress to transgenic tobacco, yeast (GS115) and E. coli (BL21).

Highlights

Low-temperature damage is the main factor limiting plant growth and crop production
The late embryogenesis abundant (LEA) protein family is very large in plants, with up to 51 genes encoding LEA proteins in Arabidopsis thaliana (Hundertmark and Hincha, 2008)
The results indicated that the group 3 LEA proteins were localized in the nucleus, cytoplasm, plasma membrane, and chloroplast membrane

Summary

Introduction

Plants have developed a wide variety of mechanisms to cope with environmental stresses. Accumulation of the late embryogenesis abundant (LEA) proteins is an important response to adverse conditions. LEA proteins accumulate in abundance during the late development stage of seeds (Dure et al, 1989; Tunnacliffe and Wise, 2007; Kosová et al, 2014; Chiappetta et al, 2015). Because the number of repetitions of the 11-mer motif is different, the molecular mass in this group of proteins varies (Battaglia et al, 2008). We have demonstrated that ZmLEA3 could enhance transgenic tobacco tolerance to osmotic and oxidative stresses. The functions of the group 3 LEA proteins remain unknown, they are assumed to be important for the establishment of environmental stress tolerance in seeds. The synthetic peptide PvLEA-22 has the ability to preserve liposomes in the dry state (Furuki and Sakurai, 2014)

Methods

Results

Conclusion