Abstract
Abiotic stresses especially salinity, drought and high temperature result in considerable reduction of crop productivity. In this study, we identified AT4G18280 annotated as a glycine-rich cell wall protein-like (hereafter refer to as GRPL1) protein as a potential multistress-responsive gene. Analysis of public transcriptome data and GUS assay of pGRPL1::GUS showed a strong induction of GRPL1 under drought, salinity and heat stresses. Transgenic plants overexpressing GRPL1-3HA showed significantly higher germination, root elongation and survival rate under salt stress. Moreover, the 35S::GRPL1-3HA transgenic lines also showed higher survival rates under drought and heat stresses. GRPL1 showed similar expression patterns with Abscisic acid (ABA)-pathway genes under different growth and stress conditions, suggesting a possibility that GRPL1 might act in the ABA pathway that is further supported by the inability of ABA-deficient mutant (aba2-1) to induce GRPL1 under drought stress. Taken together, our data presents GRPL1 as a potential multi-stress responsive gene working downstream of ABA.
Highlights
Being sessile in nature the plants are continuously exposed to different kinds of environmental stresses, including elevated level of salinity, drought and intense temperature [1] that causes reduction in crop productivity and pose a major threat to global food security [2]
We identified a novel gene GRPL1 (AT4G18280) that is annotated as a glycinerich cell wall protein-like protein in Arabidopsis thaliana by using publicly available transcriptomic data of plants exposed to different abiotic stresses
The mRNA levels of GRPL1gene was up-regulated by ~5.8 folds under salt stress, ~6.1 folds in the drought stress and ~4.1 folds in heat stress (Fig 1C)
Summary
Being sessile in nature the plants are continuously exposed to different kinds of environmental stresses, including elevated level of salinity, drought and intense temperature [1] that causes reduction in crop productivity and pose a major threat to global food security [2]. The adverse effects of these abiotic stresses are further worsening by climate change, persistent reduction in the arable land and limiting water resources [3,4]. To meet the demands of growing population and varying climatic conditions of the globe there is a great urge to increase the global food production, the demand of stresstolerant crop varieties has been increased than in the past [6,7].
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