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The transcriptome of NaCl-treated Limonium bicolor leaves reveals the genes controlling salt secretion of salt gland

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Abstract

Limonium bicolor, a typical recretohalophyte that lives in saline environments, excretes excessive salt to the environment through epidermal salt glands to avoid salt stress. The aim of this study was to screen for L. bicolor genes involved in salt secretion by high-throughput RNA sequencing. We established the experimental procedure of salt secretion using detached mature leaves, in which the optimal salt concentration was determined as 200 mM NaCl. The detached salt secretion system combined with Illumina deep sequencing were applied. In total, 27,311 genes were annotated using an L. bicolor database, and 2040 of these genes were differentially expressed, of which 744 were up-regulated and 1260 were down-regulated with the NaCl versus the control treatment. A gene ontology enrichment analysis indicated that genes related to ion transport, vesicles, reactive oxygen species scavenging, the abscisic acid-dependent signaling pathway and transcription factors were found to be highly expressed under NaCl treatment. We found that 102 of these genes were likely to be involved in salt secretion, which was confirmed using salt-secretion mutants. The present study identifies the candidate genes in the L. bicolor salt gland that are highly associated with salt secretion. In addition, a salt-transporting pathway is presented to explain how Na+ is excreted by the salt gland in L. bicolor. These findings will shed light on the molecular mechanism of salt secretion from the salt glands of plants.

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Acknowledgments

This work has been supported by the NSFC (National Natural Science Research Foundation of China, Project Nos. 31570251 and 31070158), Programs Foundation of Ministry of Education of China (20123704130001), Natural Science Research Foundation of Shandong Province (ZR2014CZ002), Young Scientist Research Award Fund of Shandong Province (BS2015SW027), and Technology Plan of Universities of Shandong Province (J15LE08).

Author contributions

B.W. and X.Z. designed the experiments. F.Y., M.A.L. and B.L. performed the experiments. F.Y. and M.A.L. analyzed the data. F.Y., M.A.L. and B.W. wrote the article. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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    1. Key Lab of Plant Stress Research, College of Life Science, Shandong Normal University, Jinan, 250014, Shandong, China

      Fang Yuan, Bing-Ying Leng & Bao-Shan Wang

    2. CAS Key Laboratory of Computational Biology, CAS-MPG Partner Institute of Computational Biology, Shanghai Institutes for Biological Sciences, Shanghai, 200031, China

      Ming-Ju Amy Lyu & Xin-Guang Zhu

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    1. Fang Yuan
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    Fang Yuan and Ming-Ju Amy Lyu have contributed equally to this work.

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    Yuan, F., Lyu, MJ.A., Leng, BY. et al. The transcriptome of NaCl-treated Limonium bicolor leaves reveals the genes controlling salt secretion of salt gland. Plant Mol Biol 91, 241–256 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11103-016-0460-0

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