Beyond osmolytes and transporters: novel plant salt-stress tolerance-related genes from transcriptional profiling data

Abstract

With recent advancements in DNA-chip technology, requisite software development and support and progress in related aspects of plant molecular biology, it is now possible to comprehensively analyze the expression of complete genomes. Global transcript profiling shows that in plants, salt-stress response involves simultaneous up and downregulation of a large number of genes. This analysis further suggests that apart from the transcripts that govern synthesis of osmolytes and ion transporters, two candidate systems that have attracted much of the attention thus far, transcripts encoding for proteins related to the regulation of transcriptional and translational machineries have a distinct role in salt-stress response. In particular, induction of transcripts of specific transcription factors, RNA-binding proteins, ribosomal genes, and translation initiation and elongation factors has recently been noted to be important during salt stress. There is an urgent need to examine cellular functionality of the above putative salt-tolerance-related genes emerging from the transcriptome analysis.