Abstract
Salt stress represents the most unfortunate abiotic stress factor in agricultural areas worldwide and contributes a severe reduction in growth, development, and yield of crop plants. Kenaf is a salt-tolerant crop. However, molecular mechanisms of salt stress tolerance in kenaf are not well elucidated. In the present study, seed germination parameters and cytological and transcriptome responses of leaves from two cultivars of kenaf (salt-tolerant P3A and salt-sensitive P3B) were analyzed between 250 and 0 mM NaCl treatments. Results indicated that under salt stress cultivar P3A had higher seed germination energy, germination index, and germination percentage with the less relative rate of salt damage than cultivar P3B. Furthermore, cytological studies indicated swelling and vacuolization of chloroplast and thylakoid in cultivar P3A under the influence of salt stress; however, chloroplast and thylakoid were degraded in cultivar P3B. Transcriptome analysis generated 8466 and 9333 differentially expressed unigenes (DEGs) (FDR ≤ 0.05 and log2FC ≥ 1) between salt-stressed and control treatments in cultivar P3A and cultivar P3B, respectively. Eight DEGs were selected randomly for quantitative real-time PCR to test the reliability of transcriptome sequencing results. Several genes encoding transcription factors WRKY, AP2/EREBP, and Hsfs families and genes like LEA, PsbA, PK, GSTs, NPR1, and TGA were induced under salt stress, and expression levels were higher in the cultivar P3A compared to cultivar P3B. The GO enrichment and KEGG pathway analysis suggested that these DEGs were related to ionic homeostasis and transport, osmotic adjustment, water deficit response, antioxidants, ROS scavenging, cellular membranes protection, photo-damage repairing cycle of photosystem II, thylakoid part, plant hormone signal transduction pathway, and may be related to salt tolerance in kenaf.
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Abbreviations
- GI:
-
Germination Index
- GR:
-
Germination rate
- RRSD:
-
Relative rate of salt damage
- DEGs:
-
Differentially expressed unigenes
- FDR:
-
False discovery rate
- PSII:
-
Photosystem II
- TF:
-
Transcription factor
- LEA:
-
Late embryogenesis abundant proteins
- PK:
-
Protein kinases
- qRT-PCR:
-
Quantitative real-time PCR
- TEM:
-
Transmission electron microscopy
- SOD:
-
Superoxide dismutase
- APX:
-
Ascorbate peroxidase
- ROS:
-
Reactive oxygen species
- GO:
-
Gene ontology
- COG:
-
Cluster of orthologous groups
- KEGG:
-
Kyoto encyclopedia of genes and genomes
- GPx:
-
Glutathione peroxidase
- GO-DAG:
-
Gene ontology directed acyclic graph
- GSTs:
-
Glutathionine S-transferase
- Hsfs:
-
Heat shock transcriptions factors
- AP2/EREBP:
-
APETALA2AP2/ethylene–responsive element bindings
- FPKM:
-
Fragments per kilobase of exons model per million
- SA:
-
Salicylic acid
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Acknowledgements
We offer great thanks to Prof. Ruiyang Zhou for providing P3A and P3B seeds, Dr. Xiangjun Kong for analyzing qRT-PCR data, Miss Saima Naeem and Dr. Muhammad Riaz for revising the manuscript, and Shanghai Majorbio Bio-pharm Technology Corporation, Shanghai, China for technical assistance.
Funding
This research work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant Nos. 31560341 and 31960368) and the earmarked fund for Modern Agro-industry Technology Research System (CARS-16-E14).
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PC: Conceived the project, revised and edited the manuscript. MHK: performed the experiment, interpreted the data, and wrote the manuscript. DT: assisted in ultra-structure observations and manuscript preparation. ZL, FW, and ZL assisted in materials management. All the authors have read and approved the manuscript.
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Kashif, M.H., Tang, D., Li, Z. et al. Comparative Cytological and Gene Expression Analysis Reveals Potential Metabolic Pathways and Target Genes Responsive to Salt Stress in Kenaf (Hibiscus cannabinus L.). J Plant Growth Regul 39, 1245–1260 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00344-019-10062-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00344-019-10062-7