1. Heat-inducible transcription factor ZmNF-YC13 regulates heat stress response genes to improve heat tolerance in maize.
- Author
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MEI Xiu-Peng, ZHAO Zi-Kun, JIA Xin-Yao, BAI Yang, LI Mei, GAN Yu-Ling, YANG Qiu-Yue, and CAI Yi-Lin
- Abstract
Heat stress is an essential factor affecting maize growth and yield formation. The exploration and mechanism analysis of related tolerance genes is an important field for breeding maize heat stress tolerant varieties. However, there is few study in this aspect. In this study, we identified a nuclear factor ZmNF-YC13 associated with heat stress response, and its encoding gene expression was rapidly induced by high temperature and osmotic stress. The promoter of Arabidopsis thaliana heat stress-inducible expression gene AtHSP70 was used to drive ZmNF-YC13 and the heat-inducible expression maize material of ZmNF-YC13 (HSP21Pro:ZmNF-YC13-myc) was successfully screened. Phenotypic analysis after high temperature treatment demonstrated that leaf length, leaf width, shoot thickness, fresh and dry weight of shoot and root were significantly higher than wild type. The relative expression level showed that ZmNF-YC13 could enhance the inducible level of downstream heat stress response genes in response to heat stress. Luciferase reporter assay and ChIP-qPCR assay also revealed that ZmNF-YC13 could regulate the expression of heat stress transcription factor ZmHsfA2c. These results confirmed preliminarily that ZmNF-YC13 could improve the heat tolerance of maize by regulating downstream heat stress response genes, which could provide a theoretical basis for marker-assisted selection and germplasm identification using the polymorphism of this locus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2023
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