Salt stress affects mRNA editing in soybean chloroplasts

Abstract

Soybean, a crop known by its economic and nutritional importance, has been the subject of several studies that assess the impact and the effective plant responses to abiotic stresses. Salt stress is one of the main environmental stresses and negatively impacts crop growth and yield. In this work, the RNA editing process in the chloroplast of soybean plants was evaluated in response to a salt stress. Bioinformatics approach using sRNA and mRNA libraries were employed to detect specific sites showing differences in editing efficiency. RT-qPCR was used to measure editing efficiency at selected sites. We observed that transcripts of NDHA, NDHB, RPS14 and RPS16 genes presented differences in coverage and editing rates between control and salt-treated libraries. RT-qPCR assays demonstrated an increase in editing efficiency of selected genes. The salt stress enhanced the RNA editing process in transcripts, indicating responses to components of the electron transfer chain, photosystem and translation complexes. These increases can be a response to keep the homeostasis of chloroplast protein functions in response to salt stress.

Plant organelle RNA editing and its specificity factors: enhancements of analyses and new database features in PREPACT 3.0

“…In some cases we refrained from adding further reference data owing to an evident lack of documented editing sites in the editomes at this stage like in the case of the rubber tree Hevea brasiliensis mitochondria [ 56 ], the soy bean Glycine max [ 57 ] and the Utricularia reniformis chloroplast [ 58 ] as well as the Saccharum officinarum [ 59 ] and Cycas organelle editomes [ 60 , 61 ]. Likewise, we avoided editome data, which obviously seem to be affected by artefacts including non-canonical types of editing, which we could not reproduce in independent cDNA analyses, like in the chloroplast transcriptome studies of Ipomoea batata [ 62 ], Deschampsia antarctica [ 63 ] or Elaeis guineensis [ 64 ].…”

Chrysanthemum CmHSFA4 gene positively regulates salt stress tolerance in transgenic chrysanthemum

“…Chloroplasts are particularly vulnerable to ROS induced damage (Gupta and Berkowitz, ). Salt stress affects mRNA editing in chloroplasts (Rodrigues et al ., ). This is consistent with the observation in Salicornia brachiata stress‐related protein ( SbSRP ) transgenic tobacco with enhanced tolerance to salt stress (Udawat et al ., ).…”

Dynamic response of RNA editing to temperature in Grape by RNA deep-sequencing

“…RNA editing has various biological functions (Fujii and Small 2011;Hammani and Giege 2014), recent studies reported that RNA editing plays important roles in various plant developmental processes and evolutionary adaptation, including organelle biogenesis, signal transduction and adaptation to environmental changes. Accordingly, numerous evidences have reported that RNA editing on transcripts of chloroplast and mitochondrial to be responsive to various environmental stressors, especially temperature, salt, affected editing of select transcripts, and the RNA second structure may regulate this relationship (Garrett and Rosenthal 2012a;Garrett and Rosenthal 2012b;Karcher and Bock 2002;Kurihara-Yonemoto and Handa 2001;Kurihara-Yonemoto and Kubo 2010;Rieder et al 2015;Riemondy et al 2018;Rodrigues et al 2017). It was demonstrated that many mutants with impaired editing of specific sites exhibited strong deleterious phenotypes, even lethality (Tang et al 2017).…”