Abstract

Biotic and abiotic stresses limit agricultural yields, and plants are often simultaneously exposed to multiple stresses. Combinations of stresses such as heat and drought or cold and high light intensity have profound effects on crop performance and yields. Thus, delineation of the regulatory networks and metabolic pathways responding to single and multiple concurrent stresses is required for breeding and engineering crop stress tolerance. Many studies have described transcriptome changes in response to single stresses. However, exposure of plants to a combination of stress factors may require agonistic or antagonistic responses or responses potentially unrelated to responses to the corresponding single stresses. To analyze such responses, we initially compared transcriptome changes in 10 Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) ecotypes using cold, heat, high-light, salt, and flagellin treatments as single stress factors as well as their double combinations. This revealed that some 61% of the transcriptome changes in response to double stresses were not predic from the responses to single stress treatments. It also showed that plants prioritized between potentially antagonistic responses for only 5% to 10% of the responding transcripts. This indicates that plants have evolved to cope with combinations of stresses and, therefore, may be bred to endure them. In addition, using a subset of this data from the Columbia and Landsberg erecta ecotypes, we have delineated coexpression network modules responding to single and combined stresses.

Highlights

  • Biotic and abiotic stresses limit agricultural yields, and plants are often simultaneously exposed to multiple stresses

  • Given the novelty of the responses we uncovered, we explored the modular organization of transcription networks using weighted gene coexpression network analysis (WGCNA; Zhang and Horvath, 2005)

  • To investigate the effects of five single stress treatments and six combined stress treatments on global transcript levels in Arabidopsis, labeled RNA was hybridized in triplicate to Arabidopsis NimbleGen ATH6 microarrays (Supplemental Table S1)

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Summary

Introduction

Biotic and abiotic stresses limit agricultural yields, and plants are often simultaneously exposed to multiple stresses. Exposure of plants to a combination of stress factors may require agonistic or antagonistic responses or responses potentially unrelated to responses to the corresponding single stresses To analyze such responses, we initially compared transcriptome changes in 10 Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana) ecotypes using cold, heat, high-light, salt, and flagellin treatments as single stress factors as well as their double combinations. Given the novelty of the responses we uncovered, we explored the modular organization of transcription networks using weighted gene coexpression network analysis (WGCNA; Zhang and Horvath, 2005) This permitted us to identify stress-responsive modules and potentially key regulatory genes to further understand plant responses to multiple stresses

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