Overexpression of GhWRKY27a reduces tolerance to drought stress and resistance to Rhizoctonia solani infection in transgenic Nicotiana benthamiana

Chloroplasts play essential roles in plant metabolic processes and stress responses by functioning as environmental sensors. Understanding chloroplast responses to drought stress and subsequent recovery will help the ability to improve stress tolerance in plants. Here, a combined proteomic and physiological approach was used to investigate the response mechanisms of Nicotiana benthamiana chloroplasts to drought stress and subsequent recovery. Early in the stress response, changes in stomatal movement were accompanied by immediate changes in protein synthesis to sustain the photosynthetic process. Thereafter, increasing drought stress seriously affected photosynthetic efficiency and led to altered expression of photosynthesis- and carbon-fixation-related proteins to protect the plants against photo-oxidative damage. Additional repair mechanisms were activated at the early stage of recovery to restore physiological functions and repair drought-induced damages, even while the negative effects of drought stress were still ongoing. Prolonging the re-watering period led to the gradual recovery of photosynthesis at both physiological and protein levels, indicating that a long repair process is required to restore plant function. Our findings provide a precise view of drought and recovery response mechanisms in N. benthamiana and serve as a reference for further investigation into the physiological and molecular mechanisms underlying plant drought tolerance.

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Cotton GhMKK5 affects disease resistance, induces HR-like cell death, and reduces the tolerance to salt and drought stress in transgenic Nicotiana benthamiana

Journal of Experimental Botany ◽

10.1093/jxb/ers086 ◽

2012 ◽

Vol 63 (10) ◽

pp. 3935-3951 ◽

Cited By ~ 78

Author(s):

Liang Zhang ◽

Yuzhen Li ◽

Wenjing Lu ◽

Fei Meng ◽

Chang-ai Wu ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Cell Death ◽

Disease Resistance ◽

Drought Stress ◽

Nicotiana Benthamiana ◽

Salt And Drought Stress

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Translocation of Drought-Responsive Proteins from the Chloroplasts

Cells ◽

10.3390/cells9010259 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 9 (1) ◽

pp. 259

Author(s):

Ping Li ◽

Haoju Liu ◽

Hong Yang ◽

Xiaojun Pu ◽

Chuanhong Li ◽

...

Keyword(s):

Drought Stress ◽

Nicotiana Benthamiana ◽

Physcomitrella Patens ◽

Potential Importance ◽

Absolute Quantitation ◽

Chloroplast Proteins ◽

Great Decline ◽

Isobaric Tags ◽

Retrograde Signal ◽

Carbonic Anhydrase 1

Some chloroplast proteins are known to serve as messengers to transmit retrograde signals from chloroplasts to the nuclei in response to environmental stresses. However, whether particular chloroplast proteins respond to drought stress and serve as messengers for retrograde signal transduction are unclear. Here, we used isobaric tags for relative and absolute quantitation (iTRAQ) to monitor the proteomic changes in tobacco (Nicotiana benthamiana) treated with drought stress/re-watering. We identified 3936 and 1087 differentially accumulated total leaf and chloroplast proteins, respectively, which were grouped into 16 categories. Among these, one particular category of proteins, that includes carbonic anhydrase 1 (CA1), exhibited a great decline in chloroplasts, but a remarkable increase in leaves under drought stress. The subcellular localizations of CA1 proteins from moss (Physcomitrella patens), Arabidopsis thaliana and rice (Oryza sativa) in P. patens protoplasts consistently showed that CA1 proteins gradually diminished within chloroplasts but increasingly accumulated in the cytosol under osmotic stress treatment, suggesting that they could be translocated from chloroplasts to the cytosol and act as a signal messenger from the chloroplast. Our results thus highlight the potential importance of chloroplast proteins in retrograde signaling pathways and provide a set of candidate proteins for further research.

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