Genome-wide identification of mRNAs involved in potato response to drought exhibiting functional evolutionary conservation with Arabidopsis plants

Drought is one of the main climate threats for crop plant production limitation. Climate change models predict constant global warming accompanied by strong reduction in water availability, especially for agricultural needs. Potato belongs to crop plants that are considered as sensitive to water shortage. Global estimation analyses show that drought may decrease potato yield by 18-32% in the period of 2040-2069 (Hijmans, 2003, Obidiegwu et al. 2015, Front in Plant science). Crop models predict that potato yields may reduce by ~30% as a result of water deficit in Poland (http://www.climateadaptation.eu/poland/agriculture-and-horticulture/). Genetic variability between potato cultivars has been described regarding their tolerance to drought (Soltys-Kalina et al. 2016). To diminish the effect of forecasted potato harvest losses, it is crucial to identify as many as possible potato plant strategies to withstand long drought periods during vegetative season. For this reason, we decided to analyse the expression differences in transcriptomes independently in two selected pairs of potato cultivars, Gwiazda/Oberon and Tajfun/Owacja. Cultivars in each pair are closely related to each other (having one parent in common or one grandparent in common, respectively) but differ in their sensitivity to drought conditions. In this paper, we identified at least 24 top selected genes whose expression profiles differ significantly during drought period when closely related studied cultivars are compared. Moreover, all but one of selected potato genes have their homologues in Arabidopsis plant genome. We found that A. thaliana mutants with mostly downregulated expression of seven selected homologous genes differ in their response to drought. To our knowledge, all of these genes were until now not reported as drought-related. Thus, our original approach and obtained results allowed to identify new players in plant response to drought. Overall design: RNA-seq was performed for leaves from 4 potato cultivars from control and drought conditions (in triplicate for each condition).

54

Pieczynski M, Wyrzykowska A, Milanowska K, Boguszewska-Mankowska D, Zagdanska B, Karlowski W, Jarmolowski A, Szweykowska-Kulinska Z