Loss of rice PARAQUATTOLERANCE 3 confers enhanced resistance to abiotic stresses and increases grain yield in field

Plants frequently suffer from environmental stresses in nature and have evolved sophisticated and efficient mechanisms to cope with the stresses. To balance between growth and stress response, plants are equipped with efficient means to switch off the activated stress responses when stresses diminis...

Full description

Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Published inPlant, cell and environment Vol. 43; no. 11; pp. 2743 - 2754
Main Authors Alfatih, Alamin, Wu, Jie, Jan, Sami Ullah, Zi‐Sheng Zhang, Jin‐Qiu Xia, Cheng‐Bin Xiang
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Oxford Wiley Subscription Services, Inc 01.11.2020
Subjects
Abiotic stress
Agronomy
Arabidopsis
CRISPR
Crop improvement
Crop yield
Environmental stress
Genetic modification
Genome editing
Homology
Mutants
Oxidation resistance
Paraquat
Rice
Stresses
Technology
Ubiquitin
Ubiquitin-protein ligase
Online AccessGet full text

Cover

More Information
Summary:Plants frequently suffer from environmental stresses in nature and have evolved sophisticated and efficient mechanisms to cope with the stresses. To balance between growth and stress response, plants are equipped with efficient means to switch off the activated stress responses when stresses diminish. We previously revealed such an off‐switch mechanism conferred by Arabidopsis PARAQUAT TOLERANCE 3 (AtPQT3) encoding an E3 ubiquitin ligase, knockout of which significantly enhances resistance to abiotic stresses. To explore whether the rice homologue OsPQT3 is functionally conserved, we generated three knockout mutants with CRISPR‐Cas9 technology. The OsPQT3 knockout mutants (ospqt3) display enhanced resistance to oxidative and salt stress with elevated expression of OsGPX1, OsAPX1 and OsSOD1. More importantly, the ospqt3 mutants show significantly enhanced agronomic performance with higher yield compared with the wild type under salt stress in greenhouse as well as in field conditions. We further showed that OsPQT3 expression rapidly decreased in response to oxidative and other abiotic stresses as AtPQT3 does. Taken together, these results show that OsPQT3 is functionally well conserved in rice as an off‐switch in stress response as AtPQT3 in Arabidopsis. Therefore, PQT3 locus provides a promising candidate for crop improvement with enhanced stress resistance by gene editing technology.
ISSN:0140-7791
1365-3040
DOI:10.1111/pce.13856