Ectopic overexpression of tomato JERF3 in tobacco activates downstream gene expression and enhances salt tolerance

Abstract

The ethylene, jasmonic acid and osmotic signaling pathways respond to environmental stimuli and in order to understand how plants adapt to biotic and abiotic stresses it is important to understand how these pathways interact each other. In this paper, we report a novel ERF protein--jasmonate and ethylene-responsive factor 3 (JERF3)--that unites these pathways. JERF3, which functions as an in vivo transcription activator in yeast, binds to the GCC box, an element responsive to ethylene/JA signaling, as well as to DRE, a dehydration-responsive element that responds to dehydration, high salt and low-temperature. Expression of JERF3 in tomato is mainly induced by ethylene, JA, cold, salt or ABA. Constitutive expression of JERF3 in transgenic tobacco significantly activated expression of pathogenesis-related genes that contained the GCC box, resulting in enhanced tolerance to salt. These results indicate that JERF3 functions as a linker in ethylene- and osmotic stress-signaling pathways.

Relationship between water use efficiency (WUE) and production of different wheat genotypes at soil water deficit

“…What is the relationship of mineral elements (in particular, K + Na + in soils) with root signal transduction (pathways)? Much of former study showed that K + was little connected with anti-drought, but recent research and our results displayed that it was linked with wheat resistance drought [3,7,39,60,66,67,75]. What is the exact soil water stress threshold of individual wheat genotype?…”

“…Many advances in relation to this hot topic, including molecular mechanism of anti-drought and corresponding molecular breeding have taken place [28,33,34,39,44,47,50,53,[55][56]63,[72][73][74][75]78]. Although the obtained transgenic crops (mainly, wheat) by different types of gene technology all exhibit drought resistance to some extent, they have many shortfalls related to agronomical performance and/or development [47,49,53,62,66,68,74]. These results imply that systemical, deeper, and comprehensive understanding of physiological mechanism of crops under drought stresses is not enough to manipulate the physiological regulatory mechanism and take advantage of full this potential for productivity, whose study is the bridge between molecular machinery of drought and anti-drought agriculture, because the performance of genetic potential of crops is expressed by physiological realization in fields [1,2,8,10,53,54].…”

Changes of some anti-oxidative physiological indices under soil water deficits among 10 wheat (Triticum aestivum L.) genotypes at tillering stage

“…Drought is a complex physical-chemical process, in which many biological macromolecules and small molecules are involved, such as nucleic acids (DNA, RNA, microRNA), proteins, carbohydrates, lipids, hormones, ions, free radicals, mineral elements [3,8,12,13,18,20,22,26,31,43,49,50,55,65]. In addition, drought is also related to salt stress, cold stress, high temperature stress, acid stress, alkaline stress, pathological reactions, senescence, growth, development, cell cycle, UV-B damage, wounding, embryogenesis, flowering, signal transduction and so on [16,17,[26][27][28]36,37,[44][45][46][47][52][53][54]62]. Therefore, drought is connected with almost all aspects of biology.…”

“…Just 2 years ago, European Commission, who once kept conservative to biotechnological breeding, constructed a big project: Plants for the Future in which much is involved in resistance drought [5]. Many advances in relation to this hot topic, including molecular mechanism of antidrought and corresponding molecular breeding have taken place [4,10,16,17,21,[23][24][25]30,31,35,37,39,42,48,[55][56][57][58][59]. Although the obtained transgenic crops (mainly, wheat) by different types of gene technology all exhibit resistance drought to some extent, they have many shortfalls related to agronomical performance and/or development [1,16,17,21,24,30,39,49,56].…”

“…Although the obtained transgenic crops (mainly, wheat) by different types of gene technology all exhibit resistance drought to some extent, they have many shortfalls related to agronomical performance and/or development [1,16,17,21,24,30,39,49,56]. The partial reason is that wheat drought resistance character is a quantitative one controlled by multi-genes in a bigger genome (16,000 Mb). These results also imply that systemical, deeper, and comprehensive understanding of physiological mechanism of crops under drought stresses is not enough to manipulate the physiological regulatory mechanism and take advantage of full this potential for productivity, Whose study is the bridge between molecular machinery of drought and anti-drought agriculture, because the performance of genetic potential of crops is expressed by physiological realization in fields [36,53,56,62,65].…”