Enhanced Expression of AtNHX1, in Transgenic Groundnut (Arachis hypogaea L.) Improves Salt and Drought Tolerence

Abstract

Salinity and drought are main threat to agriculture productivity, to avoid further losses it is necessary to improve the genetic material of crops against these stresses In this present study, AtNHX1, a vacuolar type Na(+)/H(+) antiporter gene driven by 35S promoter was introduced into groundnut using Agrobacterium tumefaciens transformation system. The stable integration of the AtNHX1 gene was confirmed by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) and southern blot analysis. It was found that transgenic plants having AtNHX1 gene are more resistant to high concentration of salt and water deprivation than the wild type plants. Salt and proline level in the leaves of the transgenic plants were also much higher than that of wild type plants. The results showed that overexpression of AtNHX1 gene not only improved salt tolerance but also drought tolerance in transgenic groundnut. Our results suggest that these plants could be cultivated in salt and drought-affected soils.

Salicornia europaea L. Na+/H+ antiporter gene improves salt tolerance in transgenic alfalfa (Medicago sativa L.)

“…For example, transgenic A. thaliana, groundnut (Arachis hypogaea), kiwifruit (Actinidia deliciosa), and poplar plants with AtNHX1 grew normally in 200 mM NaCl (Apse et al, 1999;Asif et al, 2011;Tian et al, 2011;Jiang et al, 2012). Alfalfa and tomato that overexpressed TaNHX2 showed improved tolerance to salt (Zhang et al, 2012;Yarra et al, 2012).…”

“…Recently, many Na + /H + antiporter genes have been identified and characterized in various plant species, including Arbidopsis thaliana (Apse et al, 1999), Oryza sativa (Fukuda et al, 1999), alfalfa (An et al, 2008), Salsola soda , Chrysanthemum crassum (Song et al, 2012), Cucumis sativus (Wang et al, 2013), and Zea mays (Pitann et al, 2013). The primary function conferring salt tolerance of these genes had been manifested by transgenic events in many plants (Asif et al, 2011;Tian et al, 2011;Uliaie et al, 2012;Jiang et al, 2012;Yarra et al, 2012). These transgenic events have clearly shown the feasibility of breeding salt-tolerant crops by using the Na + /H + antiporter genes.…”

Recent Advances in Fruit Species Transformation

“…Almond (Costa et al, 2006); apple (Smolka et al 2009;Lau & Korban, 2010;Vanblaere et al, 2011); banana (Subramanyam et al, 2011); fig (Yancheva et al, 2005); kiwifruit (Tian et al, 2011); peach (Padilla et al, 2006); strawberry (Mercado et al, 2010); peanut (Asif et al, 2011); watermelon (Huang et al, 2011) and pear (Sun et al, 2011) are some examples of transformed cultivars for some fruit species that the transformed tissues were regenerated via organogenesis. Since organogenesis protocols are developed for many different fruit species, it is easier to adapt the regeneration system into genetic transformation methods (Frary & Eck, 2005).…”

Impact of Molecular Genetic Research on Peanut Cultivar Development

“…Further analysis of antioxidative responses from these transgenic lines cannot provide an explanation for the elevated TE performance [73]. In addition, improved greenhouse drought and salt tolerance was found among transgenic peanut lines transformed with AtNHXI, a vacuolar Na + /H + antiporter [74]. Isopentenyltransferase (IPT), a key enzyme in the cytokinin biosynthesis pathway, driven by a drought inducible SARK promoter was used to transform peanut [75].…”