Silvas J Prince, Trupti Joshi, Raymond N Mutava, Naeem Syed, Joao V Maldonado dos Santos, Gunvant Patil, Li Song , JiaoJiao Wang , Li Lin, Wei Chen, J. Grover Shannon, Babu Valliyodan,Dong Xu, Henry T Nguyen

PLANT SCIENCE, AUGUST 22, 2015 (Impact         Factor: 4.11 DOI: 10.1016/j.plantsci.2015.08.017)

Abstract

Drought stress causes significantyield losses in major oil seed crops, such as soybean[Glycine max  (L.) Merr].  Few soybean lines have been identified as canopy -wilting tolerant;however,the molecular mechanism conferring tolerance is not fully understood. To understand the biological process, a whole genome transcriptome analysis was performed for leaf tissues of two contrasting soybean lines:drought-susceptible (DS) Pana and drought-tolerant (DT) PI 567690.A pairwise comparison of the DS and DT linesunder drought and control conditions detected 1914 and 670 genes with a greater than two-fold change in expressionunder drought conditions. Pairwise treatment comparison and gene enrichment analysis on the DT line showed the down-regulation of genes associated with protein binding, hydrolase activity, carbohydrate/lipid metabolism, xyloglucan endo-transglycosylases associated with cell-wall, apoplast, and chlorophyll a/b binding proteins. On the other hand, genes that were associated with the biotic stress response, ion binding and transport, the oxido-reductive process and electron carrier activity were up-regulated. Gene enrichment analysis detected UDP glucuronosyl transferase activity -encoding genes to be differentially expressed in PI 567690 under drought stress conditions.We found valuable SNPsvariation in aquaporin genes of the DT line that are conserved in known slower canopy -wilting lines,this shouldfacilitate marker-assisted selection in soybeans with improved drought tolerance.

Keywords Soybean. Drought stress. Aquaporin. Canopy wilting.RNA-sequencing

See http://www.journals.elsevier.com/plant-science/ or https://www.researchgate.net/publication/281304514_Comparative_analysis_of_the_drought-responsive_transcriptome_in_soybean_lines_contrasting_for_canopy_wilting

Figure 5. The genes co-expressed along with the transcription factor, FWL1 specific to DT line identified using Affymetrix  data generated on 49 anatomical soybean tissues in various experiments available in Genevestigator database [50]. The genes identified with mean person correlation co-efficient values < 0.767 calculated based on log2-scaled expression data were used. The  target FWL1 transcription factor of interest is in the center, and the correlated genes are displayed around at a distance corresponding to their correlation with the target gene.