Isolation and characterization of dehydrin gene from sugarcane (Saccharum officinarum L.) involved in drought tolerance response

Abstract

Nowadays,the development of molecular biology techniques has enabled to engineer drought tolerant sugarcane to accelerate thebreeding program. Dehydrin(DHN)that belong to the group II late embryogenesis abundant (LEA) family is known to havean important role in plant response and adaptation to abiotic stresses (drought, high salinity, cold, heat, etc.). Literature study and bioinformatics analysis reported that DHN1gene on sugarcane showed high homology sequences with sorghum DHN. The expression of DHN1gene on sugarcane var. PSJT 941 treated with various periodof drought stress had been conducted using semi-quantitative reverse transcriptase (RT)-PCR method. The results showed that the expressionlevel of DHN1 geneincreased along withthe increased period of the treatment. The highest expression level of DHN1 gene was resulted from plants that had been subjected to drought for 25 days. Amplification of DHN1gene from plants withthe highest gene expression, resulted an amplicon with a size of 465 bp which representsa full length coding sequence (CDS) of DHN1. Identification using Blast analysis showed that DHN1sequences from sugarcane var. PSJT 941 shared high homology with DHN gene on sugarcane and sorghum. The alignment results also revealed a conserved motif that characterized DHN genes.

Keywords

• drought stress
• dehydrin
• dhn1gene
• sugarcane