Co-overexpression of AVP1 and OsSIZ1 in Arabidopsis substantially enhances plant tolerance to drought, salt, and heat stresses

Abstract

Abiotic stresses such as water deficit, salt, and heat are major environmental factors that negatively affect plant growth, development, and productivity. Previous studies showed that overexpression of the Arabidopsis vacuolar H+-pyrophosphatase gene AVP1 increases salt and water deficit stress tolerance and overexpression of the rice SUMO E3 ligase gene OsSIZ1 improves heat and water deficit stress tolerance in transgenic plants. In this report, the effects of co-overexpression of AVP1 and OsSIZ1 in Arabidopsis on abiotic stress tolerance were studied. It was found that AVP1/OsSIZ1 co-overexpressing plants performed significantly better than AVP1-overexpressing plants and OsSIZ1-overexpressing plants, and produced 100% more seed than wild-type plants under single stress or multiple stress conditions. The increased stress tolerance in AVP1/OsSIZ1 co-overexpressing plants was substantially larger than the increased stress tolerance in AVP1-overexpressing plants and OsSIZ1-overexpressing plants under every abiotic stress condition tested. This research provides the proof-of-concept that crop yields might be substantially improved using this approach.

Description

This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

Keywords

Molecular Engineering in Plants, Plant Stress Responses

Citation

Esmaeili, N., Yang, X., Cai, Y. et al. Co-overexpression of AVP1 and OsSIZ1 in Arabidopsis substantially enhances plant tolerance to drought, salt, and heat stresses. Sci Rep 9, 7642 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-019-44062-0

Collections