The transcriptome of soybean reproductive tissues subjected to water deficit, heat stress, and a combination of water deficit and heat stress

Abstract

Global warming and climate change are driving an alarming increase in the frequency and intensity of extreme climate events, such as droughts, heat waves, and their combination, inflicting heavy losses to agricultural production. Recent studies revealed that the transcriptomic responses of different crops to water deficit (WD) or heat stress (HS) are very different from that to a combination of WD + HS. In addition, it was found that the effects of WD, HS, and WD + HS are significantly more devastating when these stresses occur during the reproductive growth phase of crops, compared to vegetative growth. As the molecular responses of different reproductive and vegetative tissues of plants to WD, HS, or WD + HS could be different from each other and these differences could impact many current and future attempts to enhance the resilience of crops to climate change through breeding and/or engineering, we conducted a transcriptomic analysis of different soybean (Glycine max) tissues to WD, HS, and WD + HS. Here we present a reference transcriptomic dataset that includes the response of soybean leaf, pod, anther, stigma, ovary, and sepal to WD, HS, and WD + HS conditions. Mining this dataset for the expression pattern of different stress response transcripts revealed that each tissue had a unique transcriptomic response to each of the different stress conditions. This finding is important as it suggests that enhancing the overall resilience of crops to climate change could require a coordinated approach that simultaneously alters the expression of different groups of transcripts in different tissues in a stress-specific manner.

Keywords: anther; drought; heat; leaf; ovary; pods; sepals; stigma; stress combination; transcriptomics.