Abstract
Main conclusion
ZmSUS1 improved drought tolerance of maize by regulating sucrose metabolism and increasing soluble sugar content, and endowing transgenic maize with higher relative water content and photosynthesis levels.
Abstract
Sucrose synthase (SUS), a key enzyme of sugar metabolism, plays an important role in the regulation of carbon partitioning in plant, and affects important agronomic traits and abiotic responses to adversity. However, the function of ZmSUS1 in plant drought tolerance is still unknown. In this study, the expression patterns of ZmSUS1 in different tissues and under drought stress were analyzed in maize (Zea mays L.). It was found that ZmSUS1 was highly expressed during kernel development but also in leaves and roots of maize, and ZmSUS1 was induced by drought stress. Homozygous transgenic maize lines overexpressing ZmSUS1 increased the content and activity of SUS under drought stress and exhibited higher relative water content, proline and abscisic acid content in leaves. Specifically, the net photosynthetic rate and the soluble sugar contents including sucrose, glucose, fructose and SUS decomposition products including UDP-glucose (UDP-G) and ADP-glucose (ADP-G) in transgenic plants were significantly improved after drought stress. RNA-seq analysis showed that overexpressing of ZmSUS1 mainly affected the expression level of carbon metabolism-related genes. Especially the expression level of sucrose metabolism-related genes including sucrose phosphatase gene (SPP), sucrose phosphate synthase gene (SPS) and invertase gene (INV) were significantly up-regulated in transgenic maize. Overall, these results suggested that ZmSUS1 improved drought tolerance by regulating sucrose metabolism and increasing the soluble sugar content, and endowing transgenic maize with higher relative water content and photosynthesis levels, which can serve as a new gene candidate for cultivating drought-resistant maize varieties.
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Data availability
All datasets generated for this study are included in the article/Supplementary Materials.
Abbreviations
- ADP-G:
-
ADP-glucose
- DAP:
-
Days after pollination
- INV:
-
Invertase
- SPP:
-
Sucrose phosphatase
- SPS:
-
Sucrose phosphate synthase
- SUS:
-
Sucrose synthase
- UDP-G:
-
UDP-glucose
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank BGI Tech Solutions Co., Ltd. (Shenzhen, China) for Illumina sequencing and primary bioinformatics analysis.
Funding
This study was financially supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2018YFD1000500), Integration of Science and Education Program Foundation for the Talents by Qilu University of Technology (Shandong Academy of Sciences) (No.2018–81110268), and Shandong Natural Science Foundation (ZR2020MC099).
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TX and HM designed the research project. NX and HM performed the experiments, analyzed the data and wrote this manuscript. WW, ZS and PL assisted in the determination of some physiological indexes and drought treatment. TX revised the manuscript. All the authors reviewed the manuscript.
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Data are available on request to the corresponding author. The transcriptome sequencing has been deposited under NCBI. The online version contains supplementary material that is available at (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/geo/query/acc.cgi?acc=GSE241263).
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Xiao, N., Ma, H., Wang, W. et al. Overexpression of ZmSUS1 increased drought resistance of maize (Zea mays L.) by regulating sucrose metabolism and soluble sugar content. Planta 259, 43 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00425-024-04336-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00425-024-04336-y