Yang Shen , Bowei Jia , Jinyu Wang , Xiaoxi Cai , Bingshuang Hu , Yan Wang , Yue Chen , Mingzhe Sun , Xiaoli Sun

Crop Stress Molecular Biology Laboratory, College of Agronomy, Heilongjiang Bayi Agricultural University, Daqing, 163000, China
Author    Correspondence author
Molecular Plant Breeding, 2020, Vol. 11, No. 14   doi: 10.5376/mpb.2020.11.0014
Received: 02 Jul., 2020    Accepted: 07 Jul., 2020    Published: 17 Jul., 2020

This article was first published in Molecular Plant Breeding in Chinese, and here was authorized to translate and publish the paper in English under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Shen Y., Jia B.W., Wang J.Y., Cai X.X., Hu B.S., Wang Y., Chen Y., Sun M.Z., and Sun X.L., 2020, Functional analysis of Arabidopsis thaliana galactinol synthase AtGolS2 in response to abiotic stress, Molecular Plant Breeding, 11(14): 1-11 (doi: 10.5376/mpb.2020.11.0014)

Soil salt-alkalization is one of the adverse factors limiting crop yields. Identification of key salt-alkaline tolerant genes is of great significance for molecular breeding of stress-resistant crops. In this study, a T-DNA insertion Arabidopsis mutant atgols2 showing higher sensitivity to bicarbonate salt-alkaline stress was screened out against NaHCO₃ treatment. Further bioinformatic analysis revealed that the AtGolS2 gene encoded a galactinol synthase, which is a member of the glycosyltransferase family A superfamily. We predicted the protein interaction network of AtGolS2 via SMART online analysis, and found that these AtGolS2 interacting proteins were related to lipid metabolism, galactose biosynthesis and raffinose biosynthesis, and participated in abiotic stress responses. By using the online expression data, we showed that AtGolS2 expression responded to salt, osmotic, drought and ABA stress. PCR amplification by using the three primers method verified the homozygous T-DNA insertion in atgols2. Phenotypic assays further uncovered that atgols2 mutant was more sensitive to high salt, osmotic and ABA stresses than the wild type Arabidopsis. Taken together, results in this study revealed the positive function of AtGolS2 in bicarbonate salt-alkaline, high salt, osmotic and ABA stresses, which will facilitate further research regarding the function and molecular mechanism of the GolS family genes in stress responses. 

Arabidopsis; Galactinol synthase; AtGolS2; Abiotic stress; Functional analysis