Investigating Conservation of Transcriptional Responses to Abiotic Stress within the Plant Kingdom

L. H. PEH, M. MUTWIL

Nanyang Technological University, School of Biological Sciences, 60, Nanyang Drive, Singapore 637551

With the advent of climate change, several abiotic environmental stresses have been known to impact the physiological functions and development of plants. This project aims to study environmental (heat, cold, high light, darkness) and soil-associated stresses (salinity, osmotic, nitrogen deficiency) that potentially arise from climate threats like drought, poor nutrient availability and extreme temperatures inflicted on four members of the Plantae kingdom: Klebsormidium nitens, Marchantia polymorpha, Selaginella mollendorffii and Brachypodium distachyon.

After subjecting each plant to stress levels up to 50% growth-inhibition, RNA isolation and sequencing is performed to detect which genes are significantly differentially expressed due to the stress treatment. Identified up- or down-regulated pathways activated upon acclimation to the stresses can help elucidate how does one organism respond to different stresses, whether stress responses are conserved in different species and which are the conserved genes and pathways within a particular type of stress condition.

A CoNekT-Stress database will be constructed based on the CoNekT (Coexpression Network Toolkit) framework established in the group contains many cutting-edge tools to perform comparative genomic and transcriptomic analyses (www.conekt.plant.tools). The database will contain a plethora of tools highly relevant for identifying genes that are induced by the different stresses in multiple species.