Abstract
Key message
Drought stress response studies and overexpression of vun-miR408 proved it to be essential for abiotic stress tolerance in cowpea.
Abstract
Small RNA and transcriptome sequencing of an elite high-yielding drought-tolerant Indian cowpea cultivar, Pusa Komal revealed a differential expression of 198 highly conserved, 21 legume-specific, 14 less-conserved, and 10 novel drought-responsive microRNAs (miRNAs) along with 3391 (up-regulated) and 3799 (down-regulated) genes, respectively, in the leaf and root libraries. Among the differentially expressed miRNAs, vun-miR408-3p, showed an up-regulation of 3.53-log2-fold change under drought stress. Furthermore, laccase 12 (LAC 12) was identified as the potential target of vun-miR408-3p using 5′ RNA ligase-mediated rapid amplification of cDNA ends. The stable transgenic cowpea lines overexpressing artificial vun-miR408-3p (OX-amiR408) displayed enhanced drought and salinity tolerance as compared to the wild-type plants. An average increase of 30.17% in chlorophyll, 26.57% in proline, and 27.62% in relative water content along with lesser cellular H2O2 level was observed in the transgenic lines in comparison with the wild-type plants under drought stress. Additionally, the scanning electron microscopic study revealed a decrease in the stomatal aperture and an increase in the trichome density in the transgenic lines. The expression levels of laccase 3 and laccase 12, the potential targets of miR408, related to lipid catabolic processes showed a significant reduction in the wild-type plants under drought stress and the transgenic lines, indicating the regulation of lignin content as a plausibly essential trait related to the drought tolerance in cowpea. Taken together, this study primarily focused on identification of drought-responsive miRNAs and genes in cowpea, and functional validation of role of miR408 towards drought stress response in cowpea.
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Data availability
All extracted data from the sequencing of cowpea samples used for this work are available in the Supplementary Data.
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Acknowledgements
SM expresses her sincere gratitude to the funding agency, WISE-KIRAN division, Department of Science and Technology, Government of India for fellowship and financial support for the project (reference number “SR/WOS-A/LS-86/2017”) sanctioned under Women Scientist Scheme-A. SM is also thankful to the project mentor, Birendra Prasad Shaw for supervising the work. SM is grateful to the Director of Institute of Life Sciences (ILS) for the lab facilities. GS is grateful to University Grants Commission (UGC) for fellowship. The authors deeply thank Prof. Arun Jagannath for providing pCAMBIA 2301 plasmid and Dr. María Paula Filippone for EHA105 strain.
Funding
This work was supported under the Women Scientist Scheme-A (WOS-A) by the Department of Science and Technology (DST), Government of India (Project no. SR/WOS-A/LS-86/2017).
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SM and BPS contributed to conceptualizing and designing of the manuscript. SM executed, contributed to the overall data generation and analysis. GS partly managed and executed expression data analysis of transgenic samples. SM wrote the manuscript. SM and BPS jointly revised the manuscript. All authors read and approved the manuscript.
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Communicated by Manzer H. Siddiqui.
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Mishra, S., Sahu, G. & Shaw, B.P. Integrative small RNA and transcriptome analysis provides insight into key role of miR408 towards drought tolerance response in cowpea. Plant Cell Rep 41, 75–94 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00299-021-02783-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00299-021-02783-5