Abstract
Soil salinization threats the agricultural production and food security worldwide. Salt stress induced plant senescence and chloroplast degradation. However, it remains largely unknown how the chloroplast-localized proteins affect plant response to salt stress. Here, we characterized a novel gene (At5g39520) in Arabidopsis, which is induced by salt stress and encodes a chloroplast-localized protein. Thus, this gene was named SALT-INDUCED CHLOROPLAST PROTEIN (SCP). A T-DNA insertion mutant of SCP gene (scp-1) showed the enhanced tolerance to salt stress, as indicated by the increased survival rates, fresh weights and chlorophyll contents compared with wild type plants under salt treatment. Salt-induced leaf senescence was also delayed in scp-1 mutant. The scp-1 complementation line and SCP overexpression lines displayed the hypersensitivity to salt stress. The qRT-PCR analysis indicated that the transcripts of CHLOROPLAST VESICULATION (CV), which mediates stress-induced chloroplast degradation, were altered in scp-1 mutant and SCP overexpression lines. Taken together, our results suggest that SCP gene plays a negative role in response to salt stress and has potential application for genetic modification of improving plant tolerance to salt stress.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 31871354), the Hundred Talents Program (Chinese Academy of Sciences), Southeast Asia Biodiversity Research Institute, Chinese Academy of Sciences (Y4ZK111B01), and Key Program for International S&T Cooperation from Science & Technology Department of Sichuan Province (2017HH0025).
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YZ and SW designed the experiments; YZ, YL, YL, MW, YT, PL, ZL, HL, and WH conducted the experiments; YZ and SW analyzed the data; YZ and S W wrote the manuscript. All the authors agreed on the contents of the paper and post no conflicting interest.
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Fig S1. Gene Co-expression Network showed that SCP is co-expressed with CV
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Zhuang, Y., Liu, Y., Li, Y. et al. SALT-INDUCED CHLOROPLAST PROTEIN (SCP) is Involved in Plant Tolerance to Salt Stress in Arabidopsis. J. Plant Biol. 62, 429–435 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12374-019-0356-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12374-019-0356-z