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Functional characterization of HSFs from wheat in response to heat and other abiotic stress conditions

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Abstract

High temperature stress is known to be one of the major limiting factors for wheat productivity worldwide. HSFs are known to play a central role in heat stress response in plants. Hence, the current study is an attempt to explore an in-depth involvement of TaHSFs in stress responses mainly in heat and other abiotic responses like salinity, drought, and cold stress. Effort was made to understand as how the expression of HSF is able to define the differential robustness of wheat varieties. Subsequent studies were done to establish the involvement of any temporal or spatial cue on the behavior of these TaHSFs under heat stress conditions. A total of 53 HSFs have been reported until date and out of these, few TaHSFs including one identified in our library, i.e., TaHsfA2d (Traes_4AS_52EB860E7.2), were selected for the expression analysis studies. The expressions of these HSFs were found to differ in both magnitude and sensitivity to the heat as well as other abiotic stresses. Moreover, these TaHSFs displayed wide range of expression in different tissues like anther, ovary, lemma, palea, awn, glume, and different stages of seed development. Thus, TaHSFs appear to be under dynamic expression as they respond in a unique manner to spatial, temporal, and environmental cues. Therefore, these HSFs can be used as candidate genes for understanding the molecular mechanism under heat stress and can be utilized for improving crop yield by enhancing the tolerance and survival of the crop plants under adverse environment conditions.

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Abbreviations

CTAD:

C-terminal activation domains

DAA:

Days after anthesis

HSF:

Heat shock factor

HSP:

Heat shock proteins

HT:

High temperature

NES:

Nuclear export signal

NLS:

Nuclear localization signal

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Funding

This work was funded by the Department of Biotechnology, Government of India, New Delhi, and Council of Scientific and Industrial Research, New Delhi, for awarding the Senior Research Fellowship.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Plant Molecular Biology, University of Delhi South Campus, Dhaula Kuan, New Delhi, 110021, India

    Preeti Agarwal & Paramjit Khurana

Authors
  1. Preeti Agarwal
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  2. Paramjit Khurana
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Contributions

PA and PK planned the experiment. PA wrote the manuscript. PA and PK read and approved the manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Paramjit Khurana.

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Electronic supplementary material

Supplementary Figure S1

The multiple alignments for TaHSF and its homologous members were done using ClustalW2 showing conservation of a HSF. b coiled-coil domain (PNG 1567 kb)

High resolution image (TIF 2320 kb)

Supplementary Figure S2

The multiple alignment of TaHSF transcription factor with its orthologue members from other plant species were done by ClustalW2 showing conservation of the HSF domain (PNG 1776 kb)

High resolution image (TIF 2744 kb)

Supplementary Table S1

List of primers used in the study (XLS 32 kb)

Supplementary Table S2

Distribution of HSF transcription factor in various species retrieved from Plant Transcription Factor Database. A total of 4574 HSFs have been reported in database (XLS 35 kb)

Supplementary Table S3

Details of TaHSFs reported in Triticum aestivum retrieved from Plant Transcription Factor Database along with their protein length, motifs with their positions, Gene Ontology (GO) terms and etc (XLS 19 kb)

Supplementary Table S4

Details of TaHSF (Traes_4AS_52EB860E7.2) and its homologous members retrieved from Plant Transcription Factor Database w.r.t. to HSF domain and motif derived from SMART and MEME online tool (XLS 32 kb)

Supplementary Table S5

Details of TaHSF (Traes_4AS_52EB860E7.2) and its orthologous members retrieved from Plant Transcription Factor Database w.r.t. to HSF domain and motif derived from SMART and MEME online tool (XLS 19 kb)

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Agarwal, P., Khurana, P. Functional characterization of HSFs from wheat in response to heat and other abiotic stress conditions. Funct Integr Genomics 19, 497–513 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10142-019-00666-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10142-019-00666-3

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