Plants suffer from a variety of environmental stresses during their growth and development. The evolutionarily conserved sucrose nonfermenting kinase 1-related protein kinase 1 (SnRK1) plays a central role in the regulation of energy homeostasis in response to stresses. In plant cells, autophagy is a degradation process occurring during development or under stress, such as nutrient starvation. In recent years, SnRK1 signaling has been reported to be an upstream activator of autophagy. However, these studies all focused on the regulatory effect of SnRK1 on TOR signaling and the autophagy-related gene 1 (ATG1) complex. In this study, overexpression of the gene encoding the Prunus persica SnRK1 α subunit (PpSnRK1α) in tomato improved the photosynthetic rates and enhanced the resistance to low nutrient stress (LNS). Overexpression of PpSnRK1α increased autophagy activity and upregulated the expression of seven autophagy-related genes (ATGs). The transcriptional levels of SlSnRK2 family genes were altered significantly by PpSnRK1α, signifying that PpSnRK1α may be involved in the ABA signaling pathway. Further analysis showed that PpSnRK1α not only activated autophagy by inhibiting target of rapamycin (TOR) signaling but also enhanced ABA-induced autophagy. This indicates that PpSnRK1α regulates the photosynthetic rate and induces autophagy, and then responds to low nutrient stress.
Keywords: ABA; SnRK1; SnRK2; autophagy; low nutrient tolerance.