Transgenic tobacco plants constitutively expressing peanut BTF3 exhibit increased growth and tolerance to abiotic stresses

Abstract

Abiotic stresses limit crop growth and productivity worldwide. Cellular tolerance, an important abiotic stress adaptive trait, involves coordinated activities of multiple proteins linked to signalling cascades, transcriptional regulation and other diverse processes. Basal transcriptional machinery is considered to be critical for maintaining transcription under stressful conditions. From this context, discovery of novel basal transcription regulators from stress adapted crops like peanut would be useful for improving tolerance of sensitive plant types. In this study, we prospected a basal transcription factor, BTF3 from peanut (Arachis hypogaea L) and studied its relevance in stress acclimation by over expression in tobacco. AhBTF3 was induced under PEG-, NaCl-, and methyl viologen-induced stresses in peanut. The constitutive expression of AhBTF3 in tobacco increased plant growth under non stress condition. The transgenic plants exhibited superior phenotype compared to wild type under mannitol- and NaCl-induced stresses at seedling level. The enhanced cellular tolerance of transgenic plants was evidenced by higher cell membrane stability, reactive oxygen species (ROS) scavenging activity, seedling survival and vigour than wild type. The transgenic lines showed better in vitro regeneration capacity on growth media supplemented with NaCl than wild type. Superior phenotype of transgenic plants under osmotic and salinity stresses seems to be due to constitutive activation of genes of multiple pathways linked to growth and stress adaptation. The study demonstrated that AhBTF3 is a positive regulator of growth and stress acclimation and hence can be considered as a potential candidate gene for crop improvement towards stress adaptation.

Multiomic insights into sucrose accumulation in sugarcane

“…Betweenness centrality exhibited an opposite pattern. In the networks modeled for the hybrids, genes with high betweenness were mostly associated with protein synthesis and gene expression regulation, including the protein translation factor SUI1 (Li et al 2022), the transcription factor BTF3 (Pruthvi et al 2017), and the calcium/calmodulin-regulated receptor-like kinase 1 (Yuan et al 2022). In contrast, the network modeled for S. spontaneum had genes with high betweenness primarily associated with cellular structure and division, such as the kinetochore-associated protein KNL-2 (Zuo et al 2022) and formin-like protein (Kollárová et al 2021).…”

The transcription factors of tall fescue in response to temperature stress

“…2013; Pruthvi et al . 2017). The bZIP family is one of the most widely distributed and conserved TFs in eukaryotes and is crucial in responses to abiotic stress (Riechmann & Ratcliffe 2000).…”

The transcriptional mechanism responding to air particulate matter in Laurus nobilis (L.)

“…The protein-protein interaction network revealed that BTF3 was clearly affected by air PM. This gene in known to be induced to salt stress and the transgenic expression of BTF3 enhances tolerance of transgenic plants to reactive oxygen species (ROS) through the activation of scavenging activity, enhancing higher cell membrane stability and seedling survival under osmotic stress (Pruthvi et al, 2017). BTF3 is also involved in the modulation of cold stress response.…”