NAC transcription factors in plant multiple abiotic stress responses: progress and prospects

Abstract

Abiotic stresses adversely affect plant growth and agricultural productivity. According to the current climate prediction models, crop plants will face a greater number of environmental stresses, which are likely to occur simultaneously in the future. So it is very urgent to breed broad-spectrum tolerant crops in order to meet an increasing demand for food productivity due to global population increase. As one of the largest families of transcription factors (TFs) in plants, NAC TFs play vital roles in regulating plant growth and development processes including abiotic stress responses. Lots of studies indicated that many stress-responsive NAC TFs had been used to improve stress tolerance in crop plants by genetic engineering. In this review, the recent progress in NAC TFs was summarized, and the potential utilization of NAC TFs in breeding abiotic stress tolerant transgenic crops was also be discussed. In view of the complexity of field conditions and the specificity in multiple stress responses, we suggest that the NAC TFs commonly induced by multiple stresses should be promising candidates to produce plants with enhanced multiple stress tolerance. Furthermore, the field evaluation of transgenic crops harboring NAC genes, as well as the suitable promoters for minimizing the negative effects caused by over-expressing some NAC genes, should be considered.

Sugarcane transcriptome analysis in response to infection caused by Acidovorax avenae subsp. avenae

“…Out of the 467 differentially expressed genes, six were exclusively expressed in infected plants and only 1 in control plants (aldehyde dehydrogenase putative protein) (Table 5). NAC proteins are involved in developmental processes [59,60], hormone signaling [61,62], secondary cell-wall synthesis and programmed cell death [63,64] and in plant responses to abiotic and biotic stresses [65–67]. The amino acid transporters are membrane proteins that mediate the flow of amino acids in plants and have various roles in the growth and development of plants, including metabolism of nucleotides, chlorophyll, hormones and secondary metabolites [68,69].…”

NTL8 Regulates Trichome Formation in Arabidopsis by Directly Activating R3 MYB Genes TRY and TCL1

“…The NAC transcription factors regulate multiple aspects of plant growth and development (Sablowski and Meyerowitz, 1998;Hibara et al, 2003;Kim et al, 2006;Dong et al, 2014) and plant response to environmental stresses (Tran et al, 2004;Shao et al, 2015). There are more than 100 genes in the Arabidopsis genome encoding NAC transcription factors, and 14 of them are membrane-associated transcription factors (Olsen et al, 2005;Kim et al, 2007a;Liang et al, 2015).…”

“…NAC transcription factors regulate multiple aspects of plant growth and development, including floral development (Sablowski and Meyerowitz, 1998), apical meristem formation (Hibara et al, 2003), cell cycle control (Kim et al, 2006), and secondary cell wall formation (Dong et al, 2014). NAC transcription factors are also involved in the regulation of plant hormone signaling (Fujita et al, 2004), as well as plant response to biotic and abiotic stresses (Tran et al, 2004;Shao et al, 2015). There are a total of 117 genes in the Arabidopsis genome encoding NAC transcription factors, but none of them had been reported to be involved in the regulation of trichome formation.…”

Grasses suppress shoot-borne roots to conserve water during drought

“…20 and 21 and Dataset S4). NAM family genes are plant-specific transcriptional regulators that control growth and development (22,23). We analyzed levels of the miRNAs, mi5205b, targeting the peroxidase gene.…”