抄録
The population of the earth is increasing rapidly, setting food security one of the major issues in the world. Drought, flooding, unpredictable epidemics, soil erosion and pollutants further threaten sustainable agriculture. We have shown in Arabidopsis that cytokinins (CKs) regulate plant adaptations to various abiotic stresses. In this study, we performed a genome-wide identification of CK metabolic genes encoding isopentenyl transferases and CK oxidases in soybean, and analyzed their expression profiles under normal and dehydration conditions. We found 14 and 17 genes encoding GmIPTs and GmCKXs, respectively, with high homology to its Arabidopsis counterparts. The promoter regions of these genes were found to contain several abiotic-stress inducible cis-elements. Next, we performed expression analysis of these two gene families and found that six GmIPT and six GmCKX genes were induced upon dehydration; three GmIPT and five GmCKX genes were down-regulated by dehydration. Taken together, our data indicated a substantial component of the CK metabolism is involved in the adaptation to dehydration stress in soybean.