Abstract
Drought stress is one of the major abiotic stresses that limit growth, development and yield of maize crops. To better understand the responses of maize inbred lines with different levels of drought resistance and the molecular mechanism of exogenous glycine betaine (GB) in alleviating drought stress, the responses of two maize inbred lines to drought stress and to the stress-mitigating effects of exogenous GB were investigated. Seedling morphology, physiological and biochemical indexes, root cell morphology and root transcriptome expression profiles were compared between a drought-tolerant inbred line Chang 7-2 and drought-sensitive inbred line TS141. Plants of both lines were subjected to treatments of drought stress alone and drought stress with application of exogenous GB. The results showed that with the increase of drought treatment time, the growth and development of TS141 were inhibited, while those of Chang 7-2 were not significantly different from those of the control (no drought stress and GB). Compared with the corresponding data of the drought-stress group, every index measured from the two inbred lines indicated mitigating effects from exogenous GB, and TS141 produced stronger mitigating responses due to the GB. Transcriptome analysis showed that 562 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were up-regulated and 824 DEGs were down-regulated in both inbred lines under drought stress. Due to the exogenous GB, 1061 DEGs were up-regulated and 424 DEGs were down-regulated in both lines. In addition, quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR) was used to verify 10 DEGs screened from the different treatments. These results showed that the expression of 9 DEGs were basically consistent with their respective transcriptome expression profiles. The results of this study provide models of potential mechanisms of drought tolerance in maize as well as potential mechanisms of how exogenous GB may regulate drought tolerance.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the Gansu Provincial Key Laboratory of Aridland Crop Science, Gansu Agricultural University (No. GHSJ-2020-Z5), the central government guides the special project of local science and technology development, and the Lanzhou Science and Technology Bureau (No. 2020-RC-122).
Supporting Information
Table S1. Primer sequences used for qRT-PCR analysis in this article.
Table S2. Quality control of the total RNA for RNA-Seq.
Table S3. Summary of sequencing data.
Table S4. Summary of genome mapping information.
Table S5. DEGs up-regulated in Chang 7-2 seedling roots under D treatment.
Table S6. DEGs down-regulated in Chang 7-2 seedling roots under D treatment.
Table S7. DEGs up-regulated in TS141 seedling roots under D treatment.
Table S8. DEGs down-regulated in TS141 seedling roots under D treatment.
Table S9. DEGs up-regulated in Chang 7-2 seedling roots under T treatment.
Table S10. DEGs down-regulated in Chang 7-2 seedling roots under T treatment.
Table S11. DEGs up-regulated in TS141 seedling roots under T treatment.
Table S12. DEGs down-regulated in TS141 seedling roots under T treatment.
Table S13. Function analysis of significantly up-regulated DEGs in two varieties under drought stress.
Table S14. Function analysis of DEGs that significantly up-regulated in Chang 7-2 and down-regulated in TS141 under drought stress.
Table S15. Function analysis of significantly up-regulated DEGs in two varieties under T treatment.
Table S16. DEGs used for qRT-PCR analysis.
Fig S1 Heat map of correlation analysis between samples.
Fig S2 GO annotation of up-down-regulated genes in two inbred lines under different treatments.
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YP designed the experiments. MB wrote the manuscript. WZ and MB performed the experiments and analyzed data. FC, XJ, ZZ, BJ, JW and LJ participated in the critical reading and discussion of the manuscript.
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Bai, M., Zeng, W., Chen, F. et al. Transcriptome expression profiles reveal response mechanisms to drought and drought-stress mitigation mechanisms by exogenous glycine betaine in maize. Biotechnol Lett 44, 367–386 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10529-022-03221-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10529-022-03221-6