Abstract
Cold and dehydration are adverse environmental conditions that affect plant growth and productivity. Many genes have been described that respond to both stresses at the transcriptional level, and their gene products are thought to function in stress tolerance and response even though these stresses are quite different. These genes include late embryogenesis abundant (LEA) proteins, detoxification enzymes, chaperones, protein kinases, and transcription factors. The cis-acting elements that function in stress-responsive gene expression were analyzed to elucidate the molecular mechanisms of gene expression in response to these stresses.
In this study, we searched for cold and/or dehydration inducible genes in Arabidopsis thaliana, Oryza sativa and Glycine max and analyzed conserved sequences in their promoters. The 1000-bp promoter regions upstream of putative transcriptional initiation sites located at the 5'ends of the full-length cDNA clones were used for this analysis. We found some highly conserved sequences including known cis-acting elements and novel conserved sequences in these promoter regions.
