Drought tolerance in high-generation transgenic maize inbred lines overexpressing the betaine aldehyde dehydrogenase gen
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ORIGINAL PAPER
Drought tolerance in high‑generation transgenic maize inbred lines overexpressing the betaine aldehyde dehydrogenase gene He Zhao1 · Qi Zhang1 · Mo Zhang1 · Yu‑Kun Jin1 · Zhen‑Zhong Jiang2 · Nan Jiang1 · Qi Wang1 · Jing Qu1 · Shu‑Yan Guan2 · Pi‑Wu Wang1 Received: 24 April 2020 / Accepted: 21 September 2020 © Akadémiai Kiadó Zrt. 2020
Abstract Abiotic stress such as drought seriously endangers maize growth and production. Glycine betaine (GB) accumulation in transgenic crops following heterologous overexpression of the BADH gene has been shown to dramatically improve the tolerance to salt, cold, and oxidative stresses, but it is unclear if GB accumulation leads to improved drought tolerance of maize. In this study, we analyzed the drought tolerance of high-generation BADH transgenic maize inbred lines at different growth stages using the hyperosmotic solution and water-withholding methods. Molecular detection revealed that exogenous BADH was successfully introduced into the maize plant genome and overexpressed in three transgenic maize inbred lines. Under osmotic stress, transgenic maize held better germination ability than the unmodified Dan988 (WT) line. In addition, transgenic maize contained higher levels of antioxidant enzymes and osmotic regulatory substances compared with WT, and thus accumulated less harmful substances and this alleviated the negative effects of drought. We used the membership function method to quantify the drought tolerance and found that Dan988-BADH-4 showed the best tolerance, followed by Dan988-BADH-2 and Dan988-BADH-1 while WT ranked lowest. This was consistent with the statistical analysis of the experiments. From the indoor and field survey, we observed that the agronomic traits of transgenic maize were not affected by the overexpression of BADH. In conclusion, BADH overexpression in maize is beneficial for drought tolerance and the three transgenic maize lines can be used for further breeding experiments. Keywords Zea mays · Drought stress · BADH gene · High generation
Introduction Maize (Zea mays L.) is an economically important grain crop. Due to global climate change, worldwide corn growers and producers are facing the risk of severe droughts (Feng and Hao 2020). Several studies have shown that drought has a negative impact on the vegetative period, reproductive period, and yield formation of maize (Min et al. 2016; Chen et al. 2016; Hussain et al. 2019; Sah et al. 2020). Transgenic breeding is widely regarded as an effective way to improve drought tolerance of crops. With the increasing knowledge of physiological, biochemical, and molecular mechanisms of * Pi‑Wu Wang [email protected] 1
College of Agricultural, JiLin Agricultural University, Jilin, China
College of Life Science, JiLin Agricultural University, Jilin, China
2
drought tolerance (Ingram and Bartels 1996), it has become possible to produce drought-resistant maize varieties efficiently and quickly by transgenic methods (Hu and Xiong 2014; Langridge and Reynolds 2015). Glycine betaine (GB) is
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