Molecular Cloning and Functional Analysis of GmLACS2-3 Reveals Its Involvement in Cutin and Suberin Biosynthesis along with Abiotic Stress Tolerance

Abstract

Cutin and wax are the main precursors of the cuticle that covers the aerial parts of plants and provide protection against biotic and abiotic stresses. Long-chain acyl-CoA synthetases (LACSs) play diversified roles in the synthesis of cutin, wax, and triacylglycerol (TAG). Most of the information concerned with LACS functions is obtained from model plants, whereas the roles of LACS genes in Glycine max are less known. Here, we have identified 19 LACS genes in Glycine max, an important crop plant, and further focused our attention on 4 LACS2 genes (named as GmLACS2-1, 2, 3, 4, respectively). These GmLACS2 genes display different expression patterns in various organs and also show different responses to abiotic stresses, implying that these genes might play diversified functions during plant growth and against stresses. To further identify the role of GmLACS2-3, greatly induced by abiotic stresses, we transformed a construct containing its full length of coding sequence into Arabidopsis. The expression of GmLACS2-3 in an Arabidopsis atlacs2 mutant greatly suppressed its phenotype, suggesting it plays conserved roles with that of AtLACS2. The overexpression of GmLACS2-3 in wild-type plants significantly increased the amounts of cutin and suberin but had little effect on wax amounts, indicating the specific role of GmLACS2-3 in the synthesis of cutin and suberin. In addition, these GmLACS2-3 overexpressing plants showed enhanced drought tolerance. Taken together, our study deepens our understanding of the functions of LACS genes in different plants and also provides a clue for cultivating crops with strong drought resistance.

Genome-Wide Analysis and Expression Profiling of the Phenylalanine Ammonia-Lyase Gene Family in Solanum tuberosum

“…The degree of law varies with different stresses, plants, and genes, indicating that the response of StPAL genes to high temperature, drought, and MEJA was different. This similar expression difference also exists in the GmLACS gene, and the GmLACS studied by Asma Ayaz et al (2021) also showed different expression patterns under other stress treatments [ 42 ]. This gene expression difference is also advantageous.…”

“…Different plants contain different numbers of PAL genes, and the size of the genome and gene duplication events cause these differences [ 41 ]. The LACS gene family also has other gene numbers in various plants [ 42 ]. Additionally, there are more tandemly duplicated genes in the StPALs, which confirms this.…”

Genome Engineering Technology for Durable Disease Resistance: Recent Progress and Future Outlooks for Sustainable Agriculture

“…Given that the prime editing system has sufficient versatility to complete specific forms of genome editing, these new developments have considerable potential. Moreover, it can be modified for different purposes (including crop production, resistance to abiotic and biotic stresses, and crop plant quality improvement; Yasmin et al, 2020 ; Ayaz et al, 2021a ). Moreover, the Cas12b (C2c1) system has recently been successfully applied for editing genomes in cotton plants to enhance the resistance to high temperatures, thereby paving the way for the development of varieties that can be cultivated under heat stress conditions ( Wang et al, 2020 ).…”

Identification of Potential Genes Encoding Protein Transporters in Arabidopsis thaliana Glucosinolate (GSL) Metabolism

“…Over the last few decades, genome sequencing, combined with rapid advancement in bioinformatics has led to comprehensive molecular studies on the model plants as well as non-model plants with economic importance. Furthermore, the application of bioinformatics can be used to elucidate the complex biological processes generated from molecular datasets that would unravel hypotheses of the gene’s functions, protein interactions, and other molecular mechanisms efficiently [ 47 , 48 , 49 ]. However, public databases host inaccurate information on the putative roles of TPs due to various limitations in the gene- and protein-sequence annotation processes and erroneous mismatching between genomic and functional data on protein function.…”