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De novo transcriptome analysis for exploration of genes responding to salinity in a halophyte New Zealand spinach (Tetragonia tetragonioides)

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Abstract

New Zealand spinach (Tetragonia tetragonioides) is a coastal plant species with a variety of medicinal uses in Korea. Due to its salt-tolerant capabilities, land reclamation using coastal plants such as Tetragonia have been widely employed. So far, the information about the dynamics or differentially expressed genes related to salt response in New Zealand spinach (NZS) is scarce. We analyzed the expressed sequence tags of the seawater-treated NZS, to identify key genes and pathways involved in salt tolerance. Our results indicated that the salt responsive DEGs were related to ion transport, signal transduction and secondary metabolite synthesis. Further analysis of the transcriptome profile of NZS subjected to seawater treatment highlighted the roles in scavenging and abscisic acid signal transduction. The DEGs, regulating pectin remodeling and ROS scavenging may be the key genes for NZS to adapt to salinity environment. Furthermore, genes such as senescence-associated genes (SAGs) that are highly upregulated in glycophytes during salt stress were downregulated in NZS. Similarly, during abiotic stresses the transcription of genes involved in photosynthesis is severely reduced, but the transcripts of light responsive factors in NZS were slightly downregulated, showing the efficiency of the salt regulation mechanism in NZS. This study represents the first large-scale transcriptome analysis of New Zealand spinach. Elucidating the salt tolerant properties of halophytes can provide novel findings to enhance the salt sensitive plants. Our findings could further help the understanding of the stress tolerance mechanisms in plants in general and New Zealand Spinach can be used as a halophytic model in stress-tolerance studies.

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The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article and its supplementary materials.

Abbreviations

BLAST:

Basic Local Alignment Search Tool

COG:

Clusters of Orthologous genes

DEGs:

Differentially Expressed Genes

EST:

Expressed Sequence Tag

GO:

Gene Ontology

KEGG:

Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes database

NCBI:

National Center for Biotechnology Information

RPKM:

Reads Per Kilobase of transcript per Million mapped reads

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by Basic Science Research Program (NRF-2020R1A2C1015119) funded by National Research Foundation (NRF), Ministry of Science and ICT, Republic of Korea.

Funding

Basic Science research Program, National Research Foundation (NRF), Ministry of Science and ICT, Republic of Korea, NRF-2020R1A2C1015119, Geung-Joo Lee.

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Author notes

  1. Chetan Kaur and Bashistha Kumar Kanth have contributed equally to this work.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Horticulture, Chungnam National University, Daejeon, 34134, Korea

    Chetan Kaur, Bashistha Kumar Kanth, Shipra Kumari & Geung-Joo Lee

  2. Floriculture Research Division, National Institute of Horticultural and Herbal Science, Rural Development Administration, Wanju, 55365, Korea

    Ka Youn Lee

  3. Department of Smart Agriculture Systems, Chungnam National University, Daejeon, 34134, Korea

    Geung-Joo Lee

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  1. Chetan Kaur
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Kaur, C., Kanth, B., Lee, K. et al. De novo transcriptome analysis for exploration of genes responding to salinity in a halophyte New Zealand spinach (Tetragonia tetragonioides). Plant Biotechnol Rep 16, 741–755 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11816-022-00800-x

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