Multiple PLDs Required for High Salinity and Water Deficit Tolerance in Plants
- Bastiaan O. R. Bargmann1,4,
- Ana M. Laxalt1,5,
- Bas ter Riet1,6,
- Bas van Schooten1,
- Emmanuelle Merquiol2,
- Christa Testerink1,
- Michel A. Haring1,
- Dorothea Bartels3 and
- Teun Munnik1,*
- 1Section of Plant Physiology, Swammerdam Institute for Life Sciences (SILS), Universiteit van Amsterdam, Kruislaan 318, 1098 SM Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- 2Department of Ecology and Physiology of Plants, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Boelelaan 1085, 1081 HV Amsterdam, The Netherlands
- 3Universität Bonn, Molekulare Physiologie und Biotechnologie der Pflanzen, Kirschallee 1, D-53115 Bonn, Germany
- *Corresponding author: E-mail, t.munnik{at}uva.nl; Fax, +31-20-5257934.
- Received October 13, 2008.
- Accepted November 16, 2008.
Abstract
High salinity and drought have received much attention because they severely affect crop production worldwide. Analysis and comprehension of the plant's response to excessive salt and dehydration will aid in the development of stress-tolerant crop varieties. Signal transduction lies at the basis of the response to these stresses, and numerous signaling pathways have been implicated. Here, we provide further evidence for the involvement of phospholipase D (PLD) in the plant's response to high salinity and dehydration. A tomato (Lycopersicon esculentum) α-class PLD, LePLDα1, is transcriptionally up-regulated and activated in cell suspension cultures treated with salt. Gene silencing revealed that this PLD is indeed involved in the salt-induced phosphatidic acid production, but not exclusively. Genetically modified tomato plants with reduced LePLDα1 protein levels did not reveal altered salt tolerance. In Arabidopsis (Arabidopsis thaliana), both AtPLDα1 and AtPLDδ were found to be activated in response to salt stress. Moreover, pldα1 and pldδ single and double knock-out mutants exhibited enhanced sensitivity to high salinity stress in a plate assay. Furthermore, we show that both PLDs are activated upon dehydration and the knock-out mutants are hypersensitive to hyperosmotic stress, displaying strongly reduced growth.
Key words
- Abbreviations:
- Abbreviations:
- DGK
- diacylglycerol kinase
- PA
- phosphatidic acid
- PBut
- phosphatidylbutanol
- PLC
- phospholipase C
- PLD
- phospholipase D
- RNAi
- RNA interference
- TLC
- thin-layer chromatography
- UTR
- untranslated region
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- © The Author 2008. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Japanese Society of Plant Physiologists. All rights reserved.
