Transcriptome profilings of two tall fescue (Festuca arundinacea) cultivars in response to lead (Pb) stress

Abstract

BackgroundLead (Pb) is one of the most toxic heavy metal environmental pollutants. Tall fescue is an important cold season turf grass which can tolerate and accumulate substantial amount of Pb. To estimate genes related to Pb response and the molecular mechanism associated with Pb tolerance and accumulation, we analyzed the transcriptome of tall fescue in response to Pb treatment.ResultsRNA-sequencing was performed in two tall fescue cultivars, Pb tolerant Silverado and Pb sensitive AST7001. A total of 810,146 assembled unique transcripts representing 25,415 unigenes were obtained from the tall fescue leaves. Among the panel, 3,696 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were detected between the Pb treated (1000 mg/L) and untreated samples. Gene ontology (GO) and pathway enrichment analysis demonstrated that the DEGs were mainly implicated in energy metabolism, metabolism of terpenoids and polyketides, and carbohydrate metabolism related pathways. The expression patterns of 16 randomly selected genes were in consistent with that from the Solexa analysis using quantitative reverse-transcription PCR. In addition, compared to the common transcriptional response to Pb stress in both cultivars, the regulation of numerous genes including those involved in zeatin biosynthesis, limonene and pinene degradation, phagosome was exclusive to one cultivar.ConclusionsThe tall fescue assembled transcriptome provided substantial molecular resources for further genomics analysis of turfgrass in response to heavy metal stress. The significant expression difference of specific unigenes may account for Pb tolerance or accumulation in two different tall fescue cultivars. This study provided new insights for the investigation of the molecular basis of Pb tolerance and accumulation in tall fescue as well as other related turf grass species.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12864-016-3479-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Comprehensive Transcriptome Profiling and Identification of Potential Genes Responsible for Salt Tolerance in Tall Fescue Leaves under Salinity Stress

“…This remarkable difference in GO annotations of same species might be attributed to the nature of stress differences. However, consistent with our study, under heat [ 68 ] and lead stress [ 69 ] metabolic processes and binding constituted the largest group of unigenes in biological and molecular function categories, respectively. This was also similar in Tibetan barley growing under low nitrogen conditions [ 70 ].…”

Mechanisms of Environmental Stress Tolerance in Turfgrass

“…The rapid development of laboratory techniques, such as RNA-seq and iTRAQ (isobaric tags for relative and absolute quantification), has been applied in transcriptomic and proteomic analysis to investigate the stress response of turfgrass species on the molecular level. Many metabolites, proteins, and genes related to stress response have been identified in turfgrass [53,64,144,145,158,160,161]. These remarkable results reveal deep mechanisms of stress response in turfgrass species.…”

“…However, the mechanism of heavy metal stress response in turgrass is not well understood. Recently, a number of differentially expressed genes associated with Pb stress response were detected in tall fescue, and further analysis revealed that the genes were related to the metabolism of energy, terpenoids, polyketides and carbohydrate pathways [64]. In particular, four key transcription factors such as WRKY, bZIP, ERF and MYB identified in creeping bentgrass (Agrostis stolonifera) were found to play crucial roles in Cd stress response [65].…”

Research Advances on Tall Fescue Salt Tolerance: From Root Signaling to Molecular and Metabolic Adjustment

“…The results suggest that this accumulation of Na + in the vacuoles of root cells, mediated by vacuolar Na + /H + antiporters, might reduce the toxic effects of salinity to tall fescue and thus enhance its salt tolerance. PROTEIN KINASES. Recently, many expressed sequence tags of the known stress response genes have been identified from stressed tall fescue tissue libraries, and most of the identified tags represented genes that code for antioxidant proteins as well as various transcription factor protein families (Li et al, 2017;Mian et al, 2008). In addition, through de novo assembly and characterization of tall fescue transcriptome under water stress, some important revelations about the gene regulatory mechanism of water stress responses in tall fescue have been unraveled.…”