Responsiveness of Early Response to Dehydration Six-Like Transporter Genes to Water Deficit in Arabidopsis thaliana Leaves.

Lucie Slawinski,Abir Israel,Rossitza Atanassova,Caroline Artault,Florence Thibault,Maryse Laloi,Fabienne Dédaldéchamp

doi:10.3389/fpls.2021.708876

Lucie Slawinski, Abir Israel + Show 5 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpls.2021.708876

Copy DOI

Abstract

Drought is one of the main abiotic stresses, which affects plant growth, development, and crop yield. Plant response to drought implies carbon allocation to sink organs and sugar partitioning between different cell compartments, and thereby requires the involvement of sugar transporters (SUTs). Among them, the early response to dehydration six-like (ESL), with 19 members in Arabidopsis thaliana, form the largest subfamily of monosaccharide transporters (MSTs) still poorly characterized. A common feature of these genes is their involvement in plant response to abiotic stresses, including water deficit. In this context, we carried out morphological and physiological phenotyping of A. thaliana plants grown under well-watered (WW) and water-deprived (WD) conditions, together with the expression profiling of 17 AtESL genes in rosette leaves. The drought responsiveness of 12 ESL genes, 4 upregulated and 8 downregulated, was correlated to different water statuses of rosette leaves. The differential expression of each of the tandem duplicated AtESL genes in response to water stress is in favor of their plausible functional diversity. Furthermore, transfer DNA (T-DNA) insertional mutants for each of the four upregulated ESLs in response to water deprivation were identified and characterized under WW and WD conditions. To gain insights into global sugar exchanges between vacuole and cytosol under water deficit, the gene expression of other vacuolar SUTs and invertases (AtTMT, AtSUC, AtSWEET, and AtβFRUCT) was analyzed and discussed.

Highlights

The increase of crop productivity face to climate change is a major societal challenge
Arabidopsis and other plants respond in a similar way to water deficit with a decrease of water content (WC), stomatal conductance (SC), FW, projected leaf area (PLA), and dry weight (DW) and a concomitant increase of sugars and other compatible osmolytes (Mewis et al, 2012; Sperdouli and Moustakas, 2012; dos Santos Gouvêa and Marenco, 2018; Zhao et al, 2020)
More than 1,000 genes have been identified to be involved in drought response (Seki et al, 2002; Shinozaki and Yamaguchi-Shinozaki, 2007; Lawlor, 2013; Fang and Xiong, 2015), only a few of them have been characterized in terms of induced tolerance to water depletion, combined with enhanced plant productivity in model plants, as well as in important agricultural crops (Skirycz et al, 2011)

Summary

Introduction

The increase of crop productivity face to climate change is a major societal challenge. In terms of fundamental research, drought responses of model plants and crops have long been studied for the purpose of improvement and/or survival under the conditions of severe water deficit (SD). This tolerance/survival predicts neither better growth capacity nor the enhancement of productivity. The global vision of research focused on genes, which results in the elevation of biomass and the yield of seeds under the conditions of moderate water stress (Skirycz et al, 2011; Raza et al, 2019; Zhao et al, 2020).

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion