Abstract
Plants have developed adaptive strategies to survive under different abiotic stressors. To identify new components involved in abiotic stress tolerance, we screened unannotated expressed sequence tags (ESTs) and evaluated their cold or drought response in Arabidopsis. We identified a drought response gene (DRG) encoding a 39.5-kDa polypeptide. This protein was expressed specifically in siliques and was induced by drought stress in most tissues. When a DRG-GFP construct was introduced into Arabidopsis protoplasts, GFP signals were detected only in the nucleus. The drg mutant plant was more sensitive to mannitol-induced osmotic stress in agar plates and to drought or freezing stress in soil than the wild-type. Activating the DRG restored the normal sensitivity of drg mutants to abiotic stressors. No differences in drought or freezing tolerance were observed between the wild-type and transgenic plants overexpressing the DRG. When DRG was expressed in a cold-sensitive Escherichia coli strain BX04, the transformed bacteria grew faster than the untransformed BXO4 cells under cold stress. These results demonstrate that DRG is a nuclear protein induced by abiotic stresses and it is required for drought and freezing tolerance in Arabidopsis.
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Abbreviations
- ABA:
-
abscisic acid
- AtNAR:
-
Arabidopsis thaliana non-annotated RNA
- DRG :
-
drought responsive gene
- EST:
-
expressed sequence tag
- GFP:
-
green fluorescent protein
- LEA:
-
late embryogenesis abundant protein
- ORF:
-
open reading frame
- RT-qPCR:
-
reverse transcription quantitative polymerase chain reaction
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Acknowledgements: This study was financially supported by the Chonnam National University in 2013 and the Golden Seed Project (No. 213004041CG900) for D.W. Choi. We thank Prof. H.S. Kang (Chonnam National University, Korea) for the pINIII-CspA vector and cold sensitive E.coli strain BOX4. The first two authors contributed equally to this work.
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Moon, H.D., Lee, M.S., Kim, S.H. et al. Identification of a drought responsive gene encoding a nuclear protein involved in drought and freezing stress tolerance in Arabidopsis . Biol Plant 60, 105–112 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10535-015-0567-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10535-015-0567-1