Abstract
Plants are exposed to a large number of environmental stresses such as dehydration, cold and high salinity. Plants respond to these stresses at the physiological and biochemical levels. Moreover, many genes including enzymes for metabolism and sugar and proline transporters are induced by the stresses. In this study, we analyzed ERD6 and its homologues encoding putative sugar transporters. ERD6 was isolated from a cDNA library prepared from Arabidopsis plants exposed to dehydration stress for 1 h. Expression of ERD6 and its homologues in response to dehydration, cold and high salinity stresses was analyzed by northern blot hybridization. The expression levels of these genes were increased by these stresses. We observed histochemical expression patterns of ERD6 and its homologues in Arabidopsis plants using a GUS reporter gene and detected different expression patterns between ERD6 and its homologues. Currently, we are analyzing phenotypes of knock out mutants of these genes.
