Abstract
Drought, cold, and high salinity are three major abiotic stresses effecting apple tree growth and fruit production. Understanding the genetic mechanisms of crosstalk between stress responses signalling networks and identifying the genes involved in apple has potential importance for crop improvement and breeding strategies. Here, the transcriptome profiling analysis of in vitro-grown apple plants subjected to drought, cold and high salinity stress, showed a total of 377 upregulated and 211 downregulated common differentially expressed genes (DEGs) to all 3 stress treatments compared with the control. Gene Ontology (GO) analysis indicated that these common DEGs were enriched in ‘metabolic process’ under the ‘biological process’ category, as well as in ‘binding’ and ‘catalytic activity’ under the ‘molecular function’ category. Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathway analysis showed that common DEGs were mainly belong to the ‘biological functions’ category and 17 DEGs were identified in ‘environmental information processing’ sub-category which may act as signal transduction components in response crosstalk regulation. Overexpression of 5 upregulated genes individually, out of these 17 common DEGs in apple calli promoted the consistent upregulation of DREB6, CBF1 and ZAT10 and increased the mass weight and antioxidase ability, implying these five common DEGs involved in multiple pathways and improved comprehensive resistance to stress.
Highlights
Plants are frequently exposed to various biotic and abiotic stresses, of which drought, cold and high-salinity stresses are the principal causes of declines in crop productivity worldwide[1]
Abscisic acid (ABA)-dependent and -independent pathways are activated by drought stress, the ICE-CBF-COR signalling pathway is activated by cold resistance, and the SOS pathway is induced by salt stress[5,6,7]
Www.nature.com/scientificreports overexpression of DREB2a, which has been identified as a drought resistance gene, in transgenic A. thaliana and Lotus corniculatus forage plants resulted in enhanced tolerance to both drought and salt stress
Summary
Plants are frequently exposed to various biotic and abiotic stresses, of which drought, cold and high-salinity stresses are the principal causes of declines in crop productivity worldwide[1]. Stress-inducing factors can occur simultaneously or sequentially and cause osmotic stress, water deficits, ionic imbalances, peroxidation damage and, growth inhibition, as well as effects associated with similar physiological processes[2,3] In response to these stresses, plants have developed diverse pathways that coordinate to combat and tolerate stress. We describe RNA-seq analyses of apple plants grown under drought, cold or acute high-salinity stress to identify shared regulatory pathways, key functional genes or signal transduction components involved in the three stresses. This integrated study provides insights into the molecular mechanisms of the cross-regulation of abiotic stress responses in apples
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