Abstract
Plants have evolved to have sophisticated adaptation mechanisms to cope with drought stress by reprograming transcriptional networks through drought responsive transcription factors. NAM, ATAF1-2, and CUC2 (NAC) transcription factors are known to be associated with various developmental processes and stress tolerance. In this study, we functionally characterized the rice drought responsive transcription factor OsNAC14. OsNAC14 was predominantly expressed at meiosis stage but is induced by drought, high salinity, ABA, and low temperature in leaves. Overexpression of OsNAC14 resulted in drought tolerance at the vegetative stage of growth. Field drought tests demonstrated that OsNAC14 overexpressing transgenic rice lines exhibited higher number of panicle and filling rate compared to non-transgenic plants under drought conditions. RNA-sequencing analysis revealed that OsNAC14 overexpression elevated the expression of genes for stress response, DNA damage repair, defense related, and strigolactone biosynthesis. In addition, chromatin immunoprecipitation analysis confirmed the direct interaction of OsNAC14 with the promoter of OsRAD51A1, a key component in homologous recombination in DNA repair system. Collectively, these results indicate that OsNAC14 mediates drought tolerance by recruiting factors involved in DNA damage repair and defense response resulting in improved tolerance to drought.
Highlights
Drought is a major environmental stress adversely affecting crop yield worldwide
To investigate the functions of OsNAC14 in drought stress response, we shortlisted a number of genes from our previously reported microarray data on leaves of rice exposed to different stresses such as drought, high salinity, abscisic acid (ABA), and low temperature (Oh et al, 2009)
OsNACs belonging to stress-induced NAC (SNAC) subfamily (OsNAC5, OsNAC6, OsNAC9, and OsNAC10), previously reported as drought-inducible OsNAC transcription factors, were up-regulated in response to drought stress (Figure S1C)
Summary
Drought is a major environmental stress adversely affecting crop yield worldwide. Recent climate change increases occurrence and severity of drought stress in field. To cope with drought stress, plants have been evolved to possess molecular mechanisms that coordinate expression of genes to protect them from water deficit stress and increase the chance of survival in arid regions (Yamaguchi-Shinozaki and Shinozaki, 2006; Zheng et al, 2009). Transcriptional reprograming required for drought tolerance mechanism is largely regulated by drought induced-transcription factors (TFs) such as AP2/ERF, MYB, bZIP, and NAC families (Yamaguchi-Shinozaki and Shinozaki, 2006; Nakashima et al, 2007; Zheng et al, 2009; Jung et al, 2017). Overexpression of drought induced OsERF48, OsERF71, OsNAC14 Improves Drought Tolerance in Rice
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