Candidate regulators of drought stress in tomato revealed by comparative transcriptomic and proteomic analyses

Minmin Liu; Gangjun Zhao; Xin Huang; Ting Pan; Wenjie Chen; Mei Qu; Bo Ouyang; Min Yu; Sergey Shabala

doi:10.3389/fpls.2023.1282718

Candidate regulators of drought stress in tomato revealed by comparative transcriptomic and proteomic analyses

Front Plant Sci. 2023 Oct 23:14:1282718. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2023.1282718. eCollection 2023.

Authors

Minmin Liu¹, Gangjun Zhao², Xin Huang¹, Ting Pan¹, Wenjie Chen¹, Mei Qu¹, Bo Ouyang³, Min Yu¹, Sergey Shabala^{1

4}

Affiliations

¹ International Research Centre for Environmental Membrane Biology and Department of Horticulture, Foshan University, Foshan, China.
² Guangdong Key Laboratory for New Technology Research of Vegetables, Vegetable Research Institute, Guangdong Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Guangzhou, China.
³ Key Laboratory of Horticultural Plant Biology (Ministry of Education), Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, China.
⁴ School of Biological Science, University of Western Australia, Crawley, WA, Australia.

Abstract

Drought is among the most common abiotic constraints of crop growth, development, and productivity. Integrating different omics approaches offers a possibility for deciphering the metabolic pathways and fundamental mechanisms involved in abiotic stress tolerance. Here, we explored the transcriptional and post-transcriptional changes in drought-stressed tomato plants using transcriptomic and proteomic profiles to determine the molecular dynamics of tomato drought stress responses. We identified 22467 genes and 5507 proteins, among which the expression of 3765 genes and 294 proteins was significantly changed under drought stress. Furthermore, the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) and differentially abundant proteins (DAPs) showed a good correlation (0.743). The results indicated that integrating different omics approaches is promising in exploring the multilayered regulatory mechanisms of plant drought resistance. Gene ontology (GO) and pathway analysis identified several GO terms and pathways related to stress resistance, including response to stress, abiotic stimulus, and oxidative stress. The plant hormone abscisic acid (ABA) plays pivotal roles in response to drought stress, ABA-response element binding factor (AREB) is a key positive regulator of ABA signaling. Moreover, our analysis indicated that drought stress increased the abscisic acid (ABA) content, which activated AREB1 expression to regulate the expression of TAS14, GSH-Px-1, and Hsp, ultimately improving tomato drought resistance. In addition, the yeast one-hybrid assay demonstrated that the AREB1 could bind the Hsp promoter to activate Hsp expression. Thus, this study involved a full-scale analysis of gene and protein expression in drought-stressed tomato, deepening the understanding of the regulatory mechanisms of the essential drought-tolerance genes in tomato.

Keywords: ABA-response element binding factor; AREB1; HSP; RNA-seq; drought stress; heat shock protein; proteomics.

Grants and funding

The author(s) declare financial support was received for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. This work was supported by the Science and Technology Program of Guangdong Province (2021A1515011020), National Natural Science Foundation of China (31902017, 31972416), National Key Research and Development Program of China (2022YFE0100900), the Science and Technology Department of Guangdong Province (2018A050506085, 2015A040404048, 163-2018-XMZC-0001-05-0049, 2022B1212010015, 2017-1649, 2019A1515110536), the Higher Education Department of Guangdong Province (2020KCXTD025).