Improvement of Torenia fournieri salinity tolerance by expression of Arabidopsis AtNHX5
Le-Yi Shi A , Hong-Qing Li B , Xiao-Ping Pan A , Guo-Jiang Wu A and Mei-Ru Li A CA South China Botanical Garden, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Guangzhou 510650, People’s Republic of China.
B Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Biotechnology for Plant Development, South China Normal University, Guangzhou 510631, People’s Republic of China.
C Corresponding author. Email: limr@scbg.ac.cn
Functional Plant Biology 35(3) 185-192 https://doi.org/10.1071/FP07269
Submitted: 16 November 2007 Accepted: 11 February 2008 Published: 23 April 2008
Abstract
In this paper, transgenic torenia plants expressing the AtNHX5 gene from Arabidopsis in sense and antisense orientations were produced to examine the potential role of AtNHX5 in plant salt tolerance and development. We found that torenia plants overexpressing AtNHX5 showed markedly enhanced tolerance to salt stress compared with both wild-type and antisense AtNHX5 transgenic plants upon salt stress. Measurements of ion levels indicated that Na+ and K+ contents were all higher in AtNHX5 overexpressing shoots than in those of both wild-type and antisense AtNHX5 shoots treated with 50 mm NaCl. This indicated that overexpression of AtNHX5 could improve the salt tolerance of transgenic torenia via accumulation of both Na+ and K+ in shoots, in which overall ion homeostasis and osmotic adjustment was changed to sustain the increase in shoot salt tolerance. Further, we found that overexpression of AtNHX5 in torenia significantly improved the shoot regeneration frequency in leaf explants and increased the plantlet survival rate when transferring the regenerated plants to soil. In addition, the AtNHX5 expressing plants produced flowers earlier than both wild-type and the antisense AtNHX5 plants. Taken together, the results indicated that AtNHX5 functions not only in plant salt tolerance but also in plant growth and development.
Additional keywords: growth, transgenic plants.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (No. 30170667), the CAS ‘100 Talents’ Program and the Joint Funds of NSFC-Guangdong No. U0731006.
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