Stress-responsive transcription factor families are key components of the core abiotic stress response in maize.

ABSTRACT: Abiotic stresses, including drought, salt, heat, cold, flooding, and low nitrogen, are harmful to agriculture and increasing in frequency due to climate change. Plants can experience multiple stresses within a single season, which elicit shared or overlapping responses. We searched for core stress-responsive genes in maize across stressors through meta-analysis of public RNA-seq data. Using nearly 1,900 RNA-seq samples with both set operations and random forest classification, we identified a core set of 744 stress-responsive genes across the six stressors. These are enriched in transcription factors, including the stress-responsive families AP2/ERF-ERF, NAC, bZIP, HSF, and C2C2-CO-like. Co-expression network analysis demonstrated that core transcription factors are co-expressed with stres

SUBMITTER: Pardo ACH 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12693616 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Dec

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature