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Molecular plant responses to combined abiotic stresses put a spotlight on unknown and abundant genes

ABSTRACT: Environmental stresses such as drought, heat and salinity limit plant development and agricultural productivity. While individual stresses have been studied extensively, much less is known about the molecular interaction of responses to multiple stresses. To address this problem, we investigated molecular responses of Arabidopsis thaliana to single, double, and triple combinations of salt, osmotic, and heat stresses. A metabolite profiling analysis indicated the production of specific compatible solutes depending on the nature of the stress applied. We found that in combination with other stresses, heat has a dominant effect on global gene expression and metabolites level patterns. Treatments that include heat stress lead to strongly reduced transcription of genes coding for abundant photosynthetic proteins and proteins regulating the cell life cycle, while genes involved in protein degradation are upregulated. Under combined stress conditions, the plants shifted their metabolism to a survival state characterized by low productivity. Our work provides molecular evidence for the dangers for plant productivity and future world food security posed by heat waves resulting from global warming. We highlight candidate genes, many of which are functionally uncharacterized, for engineering plant abiotic stress tolerance.

ORGANISM(S): Arabidopsis thaliana

PROVIDER: GSE146206 | GEO | 2020/05/25

REPOSITORIES: GEO

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Project description:In natural habitats, plants are often exposed to multiple stresses. Most studies, however, for plant abiotic stress responses analyzed those to individual stress but not combined stresses. In this report, we performed comparison analyses of gene expression to individual stresses, salt, osmotic and heat, and to a combination of these three stresses, which mimics arid conditions. We show here that the combined stress treatment induces unique gene expression pattern but not a simple reflection of the additive effects of individual stresses. First, the number of genes induced by combined stresses (150 mM NaCl, 200 mM mannitol and 35Â°C heat) was much smaller when compared to the sum of those induced by individual stress treatments, while the number of genes downregulated by multiple stresses was larger. A large number of genes induced by mannitol were not induced by multiple stresses, while those induced by salts were less affected in combined stress treatments. In addition, 125 genes, including13 for transcription factors, were found to be induced specifically by combined stress treatments. We report here that the plant response to a multi-stress environment represents an output of complex interactions between different stress aspects and signaling events of the various components of this environmental situation, and the determinative factor in this response is to avoid/minimize the antagonistic effects and to magnify the synergistic features of the imposed environmental challenges. Based on our results, we propose that genes that are highly induced by multiple treatments may be candidate for engineering stress tolerant crop plants. Wild-type plants of Arabidopsis thaliana were treated with three abiotic stresses, high salinity (150mM and 300mM), high osmotic pressure (200mM and 400mM mannitol) and heat (35Â°C), individually or simultaneously. Plants were treated with salt or mannitol for 16 hrs (first 1 hr and last 7 hrs are in light and other time in dark) or with heat for 4 hrs (in light) before sampling. There are three biologcal replicates.

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Molecular plant responses to combined abiotic stresses put a spotlight on unknown and abundant genes

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