Abstract
It is well established among interdisciplinary researchers that there is an urgent need to address the negative impacts that accompany climate change. One such negative impact is the increased prevalence of unfavorable environmental conditions that significantly contribute to reduced agricultural yield. Plant microRNAs (miRNAs) are key gene expression regulators that control development, defense against invading pathogens and adaptation to abiotic stress. Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis) can be readily molecularly manipulated, therefore offering an excellent experimental system to alter the profile of abiotic stress responsive miRNA/target gene expression modules to determine whether such modification enables Arabidopsis to express an altered abiotic stress response phenotype. Towards this goal, high throughput sequencing was used to profile the miRNA landscape of Arabidopsis whole seedlings exposed to heat, drought and salt stress, and identified 121, 123 and 118 miRNAs with a greater than 2-fold altered abundance, respectively. Quantitative reverse transcriptase polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) was next employed to experimentally validate miRNA abundance fold changes, and to document reciprocal expression trends for the target genes of miRNAs determined abiotic stress responsive. RT-qPCR also demonstrated that each miRNA/target gene expression module determined to be abiotic stress responsive in Arabidopsis whole seedlings was reflective of altered miRNA/target gene abundance in Arabidopsis root and shoot tissues post salt stress exposure. Taken together, the data presented here offers an excellent starting platform to identify the miRNA/target gene expression modules for future molecular manipulation to generate plant lines that display an altered response phenotype to abiotic stress.
Highlights
Driven climate change is a rapidly growing concern globally, forcing interdisciplinary research collaborations to provide solutions that address and/or negate the numerous negative consequences of a changing climate, with the provision of sustainable food security the overarching goal of contemporary agricultural research [1,2,3]
Salt stress treatment induced the accumulation of anthocyanin (Figure 1D), an antioxidant produced by plants to combat the cellular stress caused by reactive oxygen species [29,30], in the shoot apex of salt stressed Arabidopsis whole seedlings (Figure 1A)
Promotion of aerial tissue growth suggested that the 7-day heat stress treatment had a positive influence on Arabidopsis development, the 177% increase in anthocyanin accumulation observed in parallel (Figure 1D), alternatively suggested that this treatment induced high levels of stress in Arabidopsis cells, the cells of the shoot apex and rosette leaf petioles (Figure 1A)
Summary
Considering the capability limitation of the current maximum annual global crop yield to land area ratio, it is obvious that alternate strategies are required if cropping agriculture is to continue to ensure food security, whilst terminating unsustainable farming practices, and while achieving these goals in an ever increasingly unfavorable environment [4]. Lacking the mobility of metazoa, the sessile nature of a plant requires intricate and interrelated gene expression networks to mediate the plant’s ability to physiologically and phenotypically respond to its surrounding environment. Such multilayered molecular networks are especially important to a plant’s adaptive and/or defensive response when either abiotic or biotic stress is encountered [6,7]. The genetic model plant, Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis), is readily amenable to molecular modification, thereby offering plant biology researchers an excellent experimental system to validate which introduced molecular modifications mediate the expression of abiotic stress tolerance phenotypes
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