Drought and salinity are the most important abiotic stresses that affect the normal growth and development of plants. Glycine betaine is one of the most important osmolytes present in higher plants that enable them to cope with environmental stresses through osmotic adjustment. In this study, a betaine aldehyde dehydrogenase (BADH) gene from spinach under the control of the stress-induced promoter rd29A from Arabidopsis thaliana was introduced into potato cultivar Gannongshu 2 by the Agrobacterium tumefaciens system. Putative transgenic plants were confirmed by Southern blot analysis. Northern hybridization analysis demonstrated that expression of BADH gene was induced by drought and NaCl stress in the transgenic potato plants. The BADH activity in the transgenic potato plants was between 10.8 and 11.7 U. There was a negative relationship (y = -2.2083x ? 43.329, r = 0.9495) between BADH activity and the relative electrical conductivity of the transgenic potato plant leaves. Plant height increased by 0.4-0.9 cm and fresh weight per plant increased by 17-29% for the transgenic potato plants under NaCl and polyethylene glycol stresses compared with the control potato plants. These results indicated that the ability of transgenic plants to tolerate drought and salt was increased when their BADH activity was increased.
Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) tuber dormancy and sprouting is very important to potato cultivation and processing. In the present experiment, suppression subtractive hybridization was employed to identify differentially expressed genes in potato associated with tuber dormancy release. 576 random clones were selected from subtractive library and successfully sequenced. A total of 304 effective expressed sequence tags (ESTs) were obtained ultimately. The ESTs have been deposited in the EMBL\GenBank\DDBJ nucleotide sequence data libraries under accession numbers from JK483901 to JK484204. GO annotation showed that 45, 34 and 3 % ESTs were associated with binding, catalytic activity and signaling respectively, some of which were confirmed to be involved in plant dormancy breaking, however, 14 % of the ESTs did not show significant homology to any database proteins. A real-time quantitative PCR (RT-qPCR) analysis of the expression patterns of 14 selectable transcripts showed that 13 selected candidate genes were significantly up-regulated in the development process of tuber from dormancy to sprouting. A full length cDNA of ADP-ribosylation factor (ARF) gene was cloned and found it belonged to potato ARF1 gene. Tissue specific expression analysis showed ARF1 expression level was the highest in tuber. RT-qPCR analysis of the expression profile of ARF1 gene from potato tuber dormancy to sprouting revealed that the ARF1 gene expression was significantly increased after tuber dormancy breaking, which suggested that it probably associated with tuber dormancy and sprouting.
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