Open Access

ARTICLE

Overexpression of a sugarcane ScCaM gene negatively regulates salinity and drought stress responses in transgenic Arabidopsis thaliana

JINXIAN LIU¹, JINGFANG FENG², CHANG ZHANG², YONGJUAN REN², WEIHUA SU², GUANGHENG WU¹, XIANYU FU¹, NING HUANG³, YOUXIONG QUE², HUI LING^3,*, JUN LUO^2,*

1 College of Tea and Food Science; Fujian Provincial Key Laboratory of Eco-Industrial Green Technology, Wuyi University, Nanping, 354300, China
2 Key Laboratory of Sugarcane Biology and Genetic Breeding, Ministry of Agriculture; Key Laboratory of Genetics, Breeding and Multiple Utilization of Crops, Ministry of Education, College of Agriculture, Fujian Agriculture and Forestry University, Fuzhou, 350002, China
3 College of Agriculture, Yulin Normal University, Yulin, 537000, China

* Corresponding Authors: Hui Ling, ; Jun Luo,

(This article belongs to this Special Issue: Physiology and Molecular Biology of Plant Stress Tolerance)

BIOCELL 2023, 47(1), 215-225. https://doi.org/10.32604/biocell.2022.022477

Received 11 March 2022; Accepted 20 May 2022; Issue published 26 September 2022

Abstract

Calmodulin (CaM) proteins play a key role in signal transduction under various stresses. In the present study, the effects of a sugarcane ScCaM gene (NCBI accession number: GQ246454) on drought and salt stress tolerance in transgenic Arabidopsis thaliana and Escherichia coli cells were evaluated. The results demonstrated a significant negative role of ScCaM in the drought and salt stress tolerance of transgenic lines of A. thaliana, as indicated by the phenotypes. In addition, the expression of AtP5CS and AtRD29A, two genes tightly related to stress resistance, was significantly lower in the overexpression lines than in the wild type. The growth of E. coli BL21 cells expressing ScCaM showed weaker tolerance under mannitol and NaCl stress. Taken together, this study revealed that the ScCaM gene plays a negative regulatory role in both mannitol and NaCl stresses, and it possibly exerts protective mechanisms common in both prokaryotes and eukaryotes under stress conditions.

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