Identification of candidate genes conferring tolerance to aluminum stress in Pinus massoniana inoculated with ectomycorr
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RESEARCH ARTICLE
Open Access
Identification of candidate genes conferring tolerance to aluminum stress in Pinus massoniana inoculated with ectomycorrhizal fungus Haiyan Liu1,2, Houying Chen1, Guijie Ding1*, Kuaifen Li1 and Qifei Ren2
Abstract Background: Pinus massoniana Lamb. is an important afforestation tree species with high economic, ecological and medicinal values. Aluminum (Al) toxicity driven by soil acidification causes dieback of P. massoniana plantations. Previous studies showed that ectomycorrhizal fungi alleviate Al stress damages in Pinus, but the underlying molecular mechanisms and key genes induced by ectomycorrhizal fungi inoculation under Al stress in Pinus have not been explored. Herein, we applied Al stress for 60 days to P. massoniana seedlings inoculated with Suillus luteus (SL) and those non-inoculated. Then, we compared their growth parameters and transcriptome in order to detect candidate genes induced by SL conferring Al tolerance in P. massoniana. Result: Our results showed that SL inoculation confers Al stress tolerance in P. massoniana through improved growth performance, strong antioxidant enzyme activities and reduced malondialdehyde accumulation as compared to noninoculated seedlings. Transcriptome sequencing further supported these findings as very few genes (51 genes) were transcriptionally altered by Al in SL inoculated plants as compared to non-inoculated plants (2140 genes). We identified three core genes (cox1, cox3 and Nd1) that were strongly up-regulated by Al in the SL inoculated plants but were down-regulated in the non-inoculated plants. We also identified 42 genes specifically regulated by SL inoculated plants under Al stress, which are involved in a wide range of biological processes such as antioxidative response, transporters, hormone signaling and plant pathogen infection responses. Conclusions: Altogether, our data suggest that SL inoculation induces priming of key stress response pathways and triggers specific genes that efficiently alleviate Al stress effects in P. massoniana. The candidate genes resources generated in this study are of utmost importance for functional characterization and molecular studies aiming at improving Al tolerance in plants. Keywords: Aluminum toxicity, Afforestation, Gene expression, Ectomycorrhizal fungus, Pinus massoniana
* Correspondence: [email protected] 1 College of Forestry, Guizhou University/Institute for Forest Resources & Environment of Guizhou, Guiyang 550025, Guizhou, China Full list of author information is available at the end of the article © The Author(s). 2020 Open Access This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's Creative Commons l
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