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Expression of the rice CDPK-7 in sorghum: molecular and phenotypic analyses

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Abstract

Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench) is an important source for food, feed, and possesses many agronomic attributes attractive for a biofuels feedstock. A warm season crop originating from the semi-arid tropics, sorghum is relatively susceptible to both cold and freezing stress. Enhancing the ability of sorghum to tolerate cold and freezing offers a route to expand the acreage for production, and provides a potential drought avoidance strategy during flowering, an important parameter for protection of yield. Targeted perturbation of the signal transduction pathway, that is triggered by exposure to abiotic stress in plants, has been demonstrated in model systems as an avenue to augment tolerance. Calcium-dependent protein kinases (CDPKs) are key players in a plant’s response to environmental assaults. To test the impact of modulating CDPK activity in sorghum as a means to enhanced abiotic stress tolerance, we introduced a constitutively expressed rice CDPK-7 (OsCDPK-7) gene construct. Sorghum transformants carrying this cassette, were not improved in cold or salt stress under the conditions tested. However, a lesion mimic phenotype and up-regulation of a number of pathogen related proteins, along with transcripts linked to photosynthesis were observed. These results demonstrate that modulating the Ca signaling cascade in planta via unregulated enhanced CDPK activity can lead to off-type effects likely due to the broadly integrated nature of these enzymes in signaling.

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Acknowledgments

This work was partially supported through funds provided by the Nebraska Sorghum Board, and the Nebraska Research Initiative. TK was supported through a USDA-NRI graduate training grant award number USDA 2007-55100-17788. The authors wish to thank Amy Hilske for greenhouse care of plants and Yuannan Xia for assistance with the microarray study.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Agronomy & Horticulture, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, 68583, USA

    Tejinder Kumar Mall, Ismail Dweikat, Natalya Neresian, Kaimei Xu, Thomas Elthon & Tom Clemente

  2. Center for Biotechnology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, 68588, USA

    Shirley J. Sato, Zhengxiang Ge, Thomas Elthon & Tom Clemente

  3. Department of Statistics, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, 68583, USA

    Dong Wang

  4. Center for Plant Science Innovation, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, 68588, USA

    Tom Clemente

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  1. Tejinder Kumar Mall
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  9. Tom Clemente
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Correspondence to Tom Clemente.

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Mall, T.K., Dweikat, I., Sato, S.J. et al. Expression of the rice CDPK-7 in sorghum: molecular and phenotypic analyses. Plant Mol Biol 75, 467–479 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11103-011-9741-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11103-011-9741-9

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