Gene expression profiles of Pyropia yezoensis in response to dehydration and rehydration stresses

Abstract

Pyropia yezoensis is an economically important marine macroalgae, naturally distributed in the upper intertidal zone. Owing to the nature of its habitat, the thallus will periodically be exposed to seawater or atmosphere, and can lose up to 95% of its cellular water content. This makes the alga an ideal research model to investigate the mechanisms of desiccation tolerance. In this study, we investigated the response mechanisms to dehydration and rehydration stresses at the transcription level in Pyropia yezoensis. The differently expressed genes were analyzed based on the different functions of encoding proteins: effector proteins (chloroplast proteins, macromolecular protective substances, and toxicity degradation enzymes) and regulatory proteins (protein kinases and phosphatases). Under osmotic stress, the unigenes related to photosynthesis were down-regulated significantly while those encoding glutathione transferase, superoxide dismutase and heat shock proteins were up-regulated significantly. We inferred that the photosynthetic activity was reduced to prevent damage caused by photosynthetic by-products and that the expression of antioxidant enzyme was increased to prevent the damage associated with reactive oxygen species. Additionally, unigenes encoding serine/threonine kinases and phospholipases were up-regulated in response to osmotic stress, indicating that these kinases play an important role in osmotolerance. Our work will serve as an essential foundation for the understanding of desiccation tolerance mechanisms in Pyropia yezoensis in the upper intertidal zones of rocky coasts.

Keywords: Effector protein; Intertidal macroalgae; Osmotic stress; RNA-seq; Regulatory protein.