Rice DST transcription factor negatively regulates heat tolerance through ROS-mediated stomatal movement and heat-responsive gene expression

Yanfei Ding; Mei Zhou; Ke Wang; Aili Qu; Shanshan Hu; Qiong Jiang; Keke Yi; Feijuan Wang; Chong Cai; Cheng Zhu; Zhixiang Chen

doi:10.3389/fpls.2023.1068296

Rice DST transcription factor negatively regulates heat tolerance through ROS-mediated stomatal movement and heat-responsive gene expression

Front Plant Sci. 2023 Jan 31:14:1068296. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2023.1068296. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Yanfei Ding¹, Mei Zhou¹, Ke Wang¹, Aili Qu², Shanshan Hu³, Qiong Jiang¹, Keke Yi⁴, Feijuan Wang¹, Chong Cai¹, Cheng Zhu¹, Zhixiang Chen^{1

5}

Affiliations

¹ Key Laboratory of Specialty Agri-product Quality and Hazard Controlling Technology of Zhejiang Province, College of Life Sciences, China Jiliang University, Hangzhou, China.
² School of Biological and Chemical Engineering, Ningbo Institute of Technology, Ningbo, China.
³ College of Life Sciences, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China.
⁴ Key Laboratory of Plant Nutrition and Fertilizer, Ministry of Agriculture, Institute of Agricultural Resources and Regional Planning, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science, Beijing, China.
⁵ Department of Botany and Plant Pathology, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, United States.

Abstract

Plants are frequently subjected to a broad spectrum of abiotic stresses including drought, salinity and extreme temperatures and have evolved both common and stress-specific responses to promote fitness and survival. Understanding the components and mechanisms that underlie both common and stress-specific responses can enable development of crop plants tolerant to different stresses. Here, we report a rice heat stress-tolerant 1 (hst1) mutant with increased heat tolerance. HST1 encodes the DST transcription factor, which also regulates drought and salinity tolerance. Increased heat tolerance of hst1 was associated with suppressed expression of reactive oxygen species (ROS)-scavenging peroxidases and increased ROS levels, which reduced water loss by decreasing stomatal aperture under heat stress. In addition, increased ROS levels enhanced expression of genes encoding heat shock protein (HSPs) including HSP80, HSP74, HSP58 and small HSPs. HSPs promote stabilization of proteins and protein refolding under heat stress and accordingly mutation of HST1 also improved reproductive traits including pollen viability and seed setting under high temperature. These results broaden the negative roles of DST in abiotic stress tolerance and provide important new insights into DST-regulated tolerance to diverse abiotic stresses through both shared and stress-specific mechanisms.

Keywords: DST transcription factor; heat shock genes; plant heat tolerance; reactive oxygen species; reproductive traits under heat stress; stomatal aperture.

Grants and funding

This work was supported by grants from Zhejiang Provincial Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. LZ22C130003 and LZ14C020001), and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 31470368), the National Key Research and Development Project of China, the International Cooperation Project (2018YFE0111900).