Abstract
Tellungiella halophila is a halophyte, and its genes have a high sequence identity (90-95% at the cDNA level) to genes of its close relative Arabidopsis. Tellungiella plants show not only extreme salinity tolerance, but also freezing and oxidative stress tolerances. Moreover, we have revealed that Tellungiella also shows heat stress tolerance in comparison with Arabidopsis. Recently, we generated a full-length cDNA library of Tellungiella from various tissues and whole plants treated with salinity-, cold-, freezing-stresses and ABA. To identify heat tolerance genes from the library, we are carrying out mini-scale full-length over expressor gene hunting (FOX hunting), a novel gain-of-function screening system. In this study, we first extracted 264 target genes including HSPs, HSFs, and Tellungiella heat-inducible or -suppressed genes identified by Tellungiella microarray analysis, and then transformed each cDNA to Arabidopsis plants independently. We have screened approximately 60 genes and isolated one heat tolerance gene encoding HSF.
