In model plants like Arabidopsis thaliana, tolerance is often measured as “survival”, whilst in crop species like cereals, maintenance of “yield” and “productivity” is for economic reasons more important than survival. The balance between tolerance and sensitivity in particular plant species may determine whether a stress factor has positive (eustress) or negative effects. Stress in plants can be defined as an altered physiological state caused by factors that tend to change equilibrium, resulting in injury, disease or aberrant physiology in the case of a negative (distress) effect. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.Īs sessile organisms, plants depend on their ability to coordinate growth and development with environmental conditions. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are creditedĭata Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files.įunding: This work was supported by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology and a Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council grant. Received: JAccepted: SeptemPublished: October 20, 2015Ĭopyright: © 2015 Visscher et al. Finally, C-terminal GFP fusion proteins for At1g74450 were shown to localise to the cytosol.Ĭitation: Visscher AM, Belfield EJ, Vlad D, Irani N, Moore I, Harberd NP (2015) Overexpressing the Multiple-Stress Responsive Gene At1g74450 Reduces Plant Height and Male Fertility in Arabidopsis thaliana. In addition, ruthenium red staining analysis showed that At1g74450 may affect the composition of the inner seed coat mucilage layer.
Our results indicate that the At1g74450 gene provides a potential link between multiple environmental stresses, plant height and pollen development. However, the molecular factors and regulatory networks underlying environmental stress-induced male gametophytic alterations are still largely unknown. Interestingly, the effects of stress on crop productivity are most severe at developmental stages such as male gametophyte development. Alexander staining of anthers from flowers at developmental stage 12–13 showed either an absence or a reduction in viable pollen compared to wildtype Col-0 and At1g74450 knockout lines. Plants overexpressing the multiple-stress responsive gene At1g74450 are stunted in height and have reduced male fertility. Analysis of these transgenic lines showed altered phenotypes for lines overexpressing the At1g74450 ORF. Secondly, 35S-driven overexpression lines were generated for each open reading frame. None of the lines were found to be visually different from wildtype Col-0. Firstly, T-DNA insertion knockout lines were identified for each locus and screened for altered phenotypes. The selected genes have the following locus identifiers: At1g18740, At1g74450, At4g27652, At4g29780 and At5g12010.
In this study, we used transgenic knockout, overexpression and reporter gene approaches to try to elucidate the biological roles of five unknown multiple-stress responsive genes in Arabidopsis. However, not all of these genes are characterized as yet with respect to their functions. A subset of genes in Arabidopsis thaliana is known to be up-regulated in response to a wide range of different environmental stress factors.
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