Abstract
Key message
Overexpression of the Aux/IAA protein TaIAA15-1A from wheat improves drought tolerance by regulating the ABA signalling pathway in transgenic Brachypodium.
Abstract
Drought is a major abiotic stress that causes severe crop yield loss. Aux/IAA genes have been shown to be involved in drought stress responses. However, to the best of our knowledge, there has been little research on the molecular mechanism of the wheat Aux/IAA gene in the context of drought tolerance. In this study, we found that expression of the wheat Aux/IAA gene TaIAA15-1A was upregulated by PEG6000, NaCl, SA, JA, IAA and ABA. Transgenic plants overexpressing TaIAA15-1A showed higher drought tolerance than wild-type (WT) plants. The physiological analyses showed that the transgenic lines exhibited a higher survival rate, shoot length, and relative water content than the WT plants. The activities of superoxide dismutase (SOD), catalase (CAT) and peroxidase (POD) were enhanced in transgenic lines, causing a reduction in the hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) and superoxide anion radical (O2−) contents. Transcriptome analysis showed that TaIAA15-1A overexpression alters the expression of these genes involved in the auxin signalling pathway, ABA signalling pathway, phenolamides and antioxidant pathways. The results of exogenous ABA treatment suggested that TaIAA15-1A overexpression increased sensitivity to ABA at the germination and postgermination stages compared to WT plants. These results indicate that TaIAA15-1A plays a positive role in plant drought tolerance by regulating ABA-related genes and improving antioxidative stress ability and has potential application in genetically modified crops.
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Acknowledgements
This work was funded by Natural Science Foundation of Shandong Province (ZR2022QC129); Doctoral research start-up funds, Liaocheng University (318052018); State Key Laboratory of Crop Biology, Shandong Agricultural University (2021KF03).
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PS and SG conceived and designed the experiments; PS performed most experiments; CS performed exogenous ABA treatments; YJL performed expression analysis. KW, HS, SHW, XQL performed physiological and biochemical indice measures; PS wrote and revised the manuscript. All authors have read and approved the final manuscript.
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Communicated by Zheng-Yi Xu.
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299_2022_2965_MOESM2_ESM.jpg
Supplementary Fig S2. The expression levels of ABA biosynthesis and signal transduction pathway genes in TaIAA15-1A transgenic lines and WT plants file2 (JPG 2078 KB)
299_2022_2965_MOESM3_ESM.jpg
Supplementary Fig. S3. Effect overview of TaIAA15-1A overexpression on bZIP transcription factors. (A) Heatmap of bZIP transcription factors based on RNA‐seq. (B) Expression levels of bZIP transcription factors in TaIAA15-1A transgenic lines and WT plants file3 (JPG 58 KB)
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Su, P., Sui, C., Li, J. et al. The Aux/IAA protein TaIAA15-1A confers drought tolerance in Brachypodium by regulating abscisic acid signal pathway. Plant Cell Rep 42, 385–394 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00299-022-02965-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00299-022-02965-9