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Planting economic crops in soil with salt imbalances can improve land use efficiency. Hemp, which can be planted in low-salinity soil, is a crop with a very high economic value. To reveal the salt tolerance mechanism of hemp, the leaves of Longma #3 and #9 were collected at 0, 2, 4, and 6 days after salt stress in this study, and transcriptome and metabolome joint analysis were performed. The concentration of glutamic acid, succinic acid and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA) was 12 times that of the control group. The large increase in succinic acid led to the maintenance of peroxidase and superoxide dismutase levels at normal values and a decrease in H2O2 and catalase. The enriched KEGG pathway citrate cycle (TCA cycle) contains the metabolic regulation of succinic acid. Succinic acid was positively correlated with the MAPK gene. The MAPK pathway is a key pathway of plant tolerance in a high-salt environment. This study provides a reference for research on NaCl tolerance in plants and can also provide an important reference for the cultivation of NaCl-tolerant hemp varieties.

Abstract Background Sunflower is recognized as one of the most important oil plants with strong tolerance to drought in the world. In order to study the response mechanisms of sunflower plants to drought stress, gene expression profiling using high throughput sequencing was performed for seedling leaves and roots (sunflower inbred line R5) after 24 h of drought stress (15% PEG 6000). The transcriptome assembled using sequences of 12 samples was used as a reference. Results 805 and 198 genes were identified that were differentially expressed in leaves and roots, respectively. Another 71 genes were differentially expressed in both organs, in which more genes were up-regulated than down-regulated. In agreement with results obtained for other crops or from previous sunflower studies, we also observed that nine genes may be associated with the response of sunflower to drought. Conclusions The results of this study may provide new information regarding the sunflower drought response, as well as add to the number of known genes associated with drought tolerance.