Abstract
Soil salinity is a major environmental stress limiting plant productivity. Vacuole Na+/H+ antiporters play important roles for the survival of plants under salt stress conditions. We have developed salt stress tolerant transgenic tomato plants (Solanum lycopersicum cv. PED) by overexpression of the wheat Na+/H+ antiporter gene TaNHX2 using Agrobacterium tumefaciens strain LBA4404 harbouring a binary vector pBin438 that contains the TaNHX2 gene under the control of double CaMV 35S promoter and npt II as a selectable marker. PCR and Southern blot analysis confirmed that TaNHX2 gene has been integrated and expressed in the T1 generation transgenic tomato plants. When TaNHX2 expressing plants were exposed to 100 or 150 mM NaCl, they were found to be more tolerant to salt stress compared to wild type plants. Biochemical analyses also showed that transgenic plants have substantial amount of relative water content and chlorophyll content under salt stress conditions compared to wild type plants. The relative water content in transgenic and wild type plants ranged from 68 to 75 % and 46–73 % and chlorophyll content fall in between 1.8 to 2.4 mg/g fw and 1.0 to 2.4 mg/g fw, respectively, in all stress conditions. In the present study, we observed a better germination rate of T1 transgenic seeds under salt stress conditions compared with wild type plants. Our results indicated that TaNHX2-transgenic tomato plants coped better with salt stress than wild type plants.
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Acknowledgments
YR is thankful to Third World Academy of Sciences-Chinese Academy of Sciences (TWAS-CAS) for financial support in the form of TWAS-CAS Fellowship. The authors thank Prof. Shou-Yi Chen and Jin-Song Zhang for providing all facilities to carry out this work and also thank Mr. Hui Chen and Dr.Anil Kumar for their help during this work.
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Yarra, R., He, SJ., Abbagani, S. et al. Overexpression of a wheat Na+/H+ antiporter gene (TaNHX2) enhances tolerance to salt stress in transgenic tomato plants (Solanum lycopersicum L.). Plant Cell Tiss Organ Cult 111, 49–57 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11240-012-0169-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11240-012-0169-y