Abstract
Wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) yield and quality are adversely affected by heat, drought, or the combination of these two stresses in many regions of the world. A phosphoenolpyruvate carboxylase kinase-related kinase gene, TaPEPKR2, was identified from our previous heat stress-responsive transcriptome analysis of heat susceptible and tolerant wheat cultivars. Based on the wheat cultivar Chinese Spring genome sequence, TaPEPKR2 was mapped to chromosome 5B. Expression analysis revealed that TaPEPKR2 was induced by heat and polyethylene glycol treatment. To analyze the function of TaPEPKR2 in wheat, we transformed it into the wheat cultivar Liaochun10, and observed that the transgenic lines exhibited enhanced heat and dehydration stress tolerance. To examine whether TaPEPKR2 exhibits the same function in dicotyledonous plants, we transformed it into Arabidopsis, and found that its overexpression functionally enhanced tolerance to heat and dehydration stresses. Our results imply that TaPEPKR2 plays an important role in both heat and dehydration stress tolerance, and could be utilized as a candidate gene in transgenic breeding.
Highlights
Heat and drought stress and their combination during the growing season are major environmental factors affecting the production and quality of wheat worldwide
TaPEPKR2 transgenic lines showed significantly higher total root lengths in the presence of 10% PEG than WT (Figure 4). These results indicate that the overexpression of TaPEPKR2 in wheat conferred dehydration stress tolerance
We identified a wheat PEP carboxylase kinase-related kinase gene, TaPEPKR2, that we showed to be involved in both heat and dehydration stress tolerance
Summary
Heat and drought stress and their combination during the growing season are major environmental factors affecting the production and quality of wheat worldwide. A 5.5% decrease in global wheat yields was caused by heat stress between 1980–2008 (Lobell et al, 2011), while drought stress caused considerable yield loss and high economic costs in more than 50% of wheat cultivation areas (Ashraf, 2010). Research into the genetic mechanism of heat and drought stress tolerance is getting increasingly important. Plants have developed a range of response mechanisms to adjust to abiotic stress, especially molecular responses to maintain normal activities (Shinozaki and Dennis, 2003; Ashraf, 2010; Mittler et al, 2012; Qu et al, 2013). Genes responding to abiotic stress are essential for enhancing abiotic stress tolerance, and an understanding of these is crucial to developing abiotic stress-tolerant crops.
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