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Regulation of α-expansins genes in Arabidopsis thaliana seeds during post-osmopriming germination

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Abstract

Seed osmopriming is a pre-sowing treatment that involves limitation of the seed water imbibition, so that pre-germinative metabolic activities proceed without radicular protrusion. This technique is used for improving germination rate, uniformity of seedling growth and hastening the time to start germination. In Arabidopsis thaliana, seed germination has been associated with the induction of enzymes involved in cell wall modifications, such as expansins. The α-expansins (EXPAs) are involved in cell wall relaxation and extension during seed germination. We used online tools to identify AtEXPA genes with preferential expression during seed germination and RT-qPCR to study the expression of five EXPA genes at different germination stages of non-primed and osmoprimed seeds. In silico promoter analysis of these genes showed that motifs similar to cis-acting elements related to abiotic stress, light and phytohormone responses are the most overrepresented in promoters of these AtEXPA genes, showing that their expression is likely be regulated by intrinsic developmental and environmental signals during Arabidopsis seed germination. The osmopriming conditioning had a decreased time and mean to 50% germination without affecting the percentage of final seed germination. The dried PEG-treated seeds showed noticeable high mRNA levels earlier at the beginning of water imbibition (18 h), showing that transcripts of all five EXPA isoforms were significantly produced during the osmopriming process. The strong up-regulation of these AtEXPA genes, mainly AtEXPA2, were associated with the earlier germination of the osmoprimed seeds, which qualifies them to monitor osmopriming procedures and the advancement of germination.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful by the suggestions provided by Dr. Peter E. Toorop. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

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  1. Alessandra Ferreira Ribas and Nathalia Volpi e Silva have contributed equally to this article.

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Agronomy Graduate Program, Molecular Genetic Laboratory, Universidade do Oeste Paulista (UNOESTE), Rod. Raposo Tavares, km 572, Limoeiro, Presidente Prudente, SP, 19067-175, Brazil

    Alessandra Ferreira Ribas, Tiago Benedito dos Santos & Luiz Gonzaga Esteves Vieira

  2. Department of Plant Biology, Institute of Biology, University of Campinas (UNICAMP), Cidade Universitária Zeferina Vaz, Campinas, SP, 13083-970, Brazil

    Nathalia Volpi e Silva

  3. Agronomy Graduate Program, Seed Reserach Laboratory, Universidade do Oeste Paulista (UNOESTE), Rod. Raposo Tavares, km 572, Limoeiro, Presidente Prudente, SP, 19067-175, Brazil

    Fabiana Lima Abrantes, Ceci Castilho Custódio & Nelson Barbosa Machado-Neto

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  1. Alessandra Ferreira Ribas
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Contributions

LGEV and AFR conceived and designed the experiments. FLA, CCC and NBMN performed the germination and priming experiments. AFR and NVS carried out the bioinformatics analysis. AFR and TBS carried out the RT-qPCR assays and analyzed the data. LGEV, AFR and NVC wrote the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Alessandra Ferreira Ribas.

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Conflict of interest

NVS has received a grant from São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) and Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) for the fellowship during her doctor degree and National Council for Scientific and Technological Development—CNPq for the fellowship during her master degree. TBS has received a grant from Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES) for postdoctoral fellowship. LGEV has received a grant from National Council for Scientific and Technological Development—CNPq for the research fellowship. AFR, FLA, CCC, NBM declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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Fig. S1

Heatmap produced by GENEVESTIGATOR (https://www.genevestigator.com) showing the expression pattern of 23 α-expansins during developmental stages of A. thaliana. The stages of development from seed germination to senescence are grouped arbitrarily based on Boyes et al. (2001). Data were retrieved from GENEVESTIGATOR (Zimmermann et al. 2004) (TIFF 1478 kb)

Fig. S2

Expression pattern of eight α-expansins during developmental stages of A. thaliana produced by GENEVESTIGATOR (https://www.genevestigator.com). The stages of development from seed germination to senescence are grouped arbitrarily based on Boyes et al. (2001). Data were retrieved from GENEVESTIGATOR (Zimmermann et al. 2004) (TIFF 1415 kb)

Fig. S3

Transcriptional profiles of five AtEXPAs during seed germination. The data were generated in the database BAR eFP Browser - http://bar.utoronto.ca/efp_arabidopsis/cgi-bin/efpWeb.cgi (Winter et al. 2007) - based on experiments for (A) non-dormant, non-stratified after-ripened wild-type seeds (Nakabayashi et al. 2005), (B) cold-stratified wild-type seeds (Yamauchi et al. 2004) (TIFF 586 kb)

Fig. S4

Distribution of the identified α-expansins genes on five chromosomes of A. thaliana. The chromosomal position of each gene was mapped according to the A. thaliana genome. The location of each gene was indicated by a line (TIFF 1576 kb)

Fig. S5

Putative cis-regulatory elements mapped onto the promoters of five EXPAs of A. thaliana up-regulated during seed germination. A Gibberellic acid motifs; B Abscisic acid/Abiotic stress motifs; C Light related motifs and D Seed related motifs. The size of each promoter region was one kb in relation to the translation start codon (ATG). A color key of cis-elements is given at the left of the image. Horizontal black lines in each block represent the promoter sequences and colored squares show the position of the mapped cis-element occurrences found in sense (above line) or anti-sense orientation (below line) (TIFF 1871 kb)

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Ferreira Ribas, A., Volpi e Silva, N., dos Santos, T.B. et al. Regulation of α-expansins genes in Arabidopsis thaliana seeds during post-osmopriming germination. Physiol Mol Biol Plants 25, 511–522 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12298-018-0620-6

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