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A maize stress-responsive NAC transcription factor, ZmSNAC1, confers enhanced tolerance to dehydration in transgenic Arabidopsis

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Abstract

NAC proteins are plant-specific transcription factors that play essential roles in stress responses. However, only little information regarding stress-related NAC genes is available in maize. In this study, a maize NAC gene, ZmSNAC1, was cloned and functionally characterized. Expression analysis revealed that ZmSNAC1 was strongly induced by low temperature, high-salinity, drought stress, and abscisic acid (ABA) treatment, but downregulated by salicylic acid treatment. Subcellular localization experiments in Arabidopsis protoplast cells indicated that ZmSNAC1 was localized in the nucleus. Transactivation assays demonstrated that ZmSNAC1 functioned as a transcriptional activator. Overexpression of ZmSNAC1 in Arabidopsis led to hypersensitivity to ABA and osmotic stress at the germination stage, but enhanced tolerance to dehydration compared to wild-type seedlings. These results suggest that ZmSNAC1 functions as a stress-responsive transcription factor in positive modulation of abiotic stress tolerance, and may have applications in the engineering of drought-tolerant crops.

Key message ZmSNAC1 functioned as a stress-responsive transcription factor in response to abiotic stresses, and might be useful for crop tolerance improvement.

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Abbreviations

ABA:

Abscisic acid

SA:

Salicylic acid

NAC:

NAM, ATAF1/2 and CUC2

ORF:

Open reading frame

GFP:

Green fluorescent protein

MeJA:

Methyl jasmonic acid

SNAC:

Stress responsive NAC

PCR:

Polymerase chain reaction

2, 4-D:

2, 4 Dichlorophenoxyacetic acid

CaMV:

Cauliflower mosaic virus

UTR:

Untranslated regions

SSR:

Simple sequence repeats

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Acknowledgments

We are grateful to Dr. Feng Qin (Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences) for providing the pGreen-GFP-N vector and Dr. Fang-pu Han (Institute of Genetics and Developmental Biology, Chinese Academy of Sciences) for using Zeiss LSM 710 confocal laser scanning system. We really appreciate the anonymous reviewers’ helpful comments and suggestions. This work was partly supported by grants provided by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2012AA10A306, 2009CB118400) and China Natural Science Foundation (U1138304).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Crop Science, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, The National Key Facility for Crop Gene Resources and Genetic Improvement (NFCRI), Beijing, 100081, China

    Min Lu, Sheng Ying, Deng-Feng Zhang, Yun-Su Shi, Yan-Chun Song, Tian-Yu Wang & Yu Li

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  1. Min Lu
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  2. Sheng Ying
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  3. Deng-Feng Zhang
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  7. Yu Li
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Correspondence to Tian-Yu Wang or Yu Li.

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Communicated by K. Wang.

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Lu, M., Ying, S., Zhang, DF. et al. A maize stress-responsive NAC transcription factor, ZmSNAC1, confers enhanced tolerance to dehydration in transgenic Arabidopsis . Plant Cell Rep 31, 1701–1711 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00299-012-1284-2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00299-012-1284-2

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