Genome-wide analysis of WD40 protein family and functional characterization of BvWD40-82 in sugar beet

Zhirui Wu; Tingyue Zhang; Jinna Li; Sixue Chen; Inga R Grin; Dmitry O Zharkov; Bing Yu; Haiying Li

doi:10.3389/fpls.2023.1185440

Genome-wide analysis of WD40 protein family and functional characterization of BvWD40-82 in sugar beet

Front Plant Sci. 2023 Jun 2:14:1185440. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2023.1185440. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Zhirui Wu¹, Tingyue Zhang¹, Jinna Li¹, Sixue Chen², Inga R Grin^{3

4}, Dmitry O Zharkov^{3

4}, Bing Yu¹, Haiying Li¹

Affiliations

¹ Engineering Research Center of Agricultural Microbiology Technology, Ministry of Education & Heilongjiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Plant Genetic Engineering and Biological Fermentation Engineering for Cold Region & Key Laboratory of Molecular Biology, College of Heilongjiang Province & School of Life Sciences, Heilongjiang University, Harbin, China.
² Department of Biology, University of Mississippi, Oxford, MS, United States.
³ Department of Natural Sciences, Novosibirsk State University, Novosibirsk, Russia.
⁴ Institute of Chemical Biology and Fundamental Medicine, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Novosibirsk, Russia.

Abstract

Sugar beet is one of the most important sugar crops in the world. It contributes greatly to the global sugar production, but salt stress negatively affects the crop yield. WD40 proteins play important roles in plant growth and response to abiotic stresses through their involvement in a variety of biological processes, such as signal transduction, histone modification, ubiquitination, and RNA processing. The WD40 protein family has been well-studied in Arabidopsis thaliana, rice and other plants, but the systematic analysis of the sugar beet WD40 proteins has not been reported. In this study, a total of 177 BvWD40 proteins were identified from the sugar beet genome, and their evolutionary characteristics, protein structure, gene structure, protein interaction network and gene ontology were systematically analyzed to understand their evolution and function. Meanwhile, the expression patterns of BvWD40s under salt stress were characterized, and a BvWD40-82 gene was hypothesized as a salt-tolerant candidate gene. Its function was further characterized using molecular and genetic methods. The result showed that BvWD40-82 enhanced salt stress tolerance in transgenic Arabidopsis seedlings by increasing the contents of osmolytes and antioxidant enzyme activities, maintaining intracellular ion homeostasis and increasing the expression of genes related to SOS and ABA pathways. The result has laid a foundation for further mechanistic study of the BvWD40 genes in sugar beet tolerance to salt stress, and it may inform biotechnological applications in improving crop stress resilience.

Keywords: BvWD40-82; WD40 proteins; expression profile; function; salt stress; sugar beet (Beta vulgaris L.).

Grants and funding

This research was funded by International Cooperation and Exchange of the National Science Foundation of China Project (32261133530) and the National Science Foundation of China Project (32072122) and the Russian Science Foundation (23-44-00050). This work was supported by Heilongjiang Provincial Key Laboratory of Plant Genetic Engineering and Biological Fermentation Engineering for Cold Region.