Environmental stress tolerance of transgenic poplar overexpressing AtGolS2 and AtSRK2C

Abstract

Wood is the largest sustainable biomass on the land. Thus it has been expected to increase the yield of woody biomass by adding environmental stress tolerance with transgenic technology. However, there are only limited reports on production of transgenic trees with the environmental stress tolerance and on the strategy to evaluate their abilities for stress tolerance. Here, we generated and analyzed transgenic poplar (Populus tremula x tremuloides) overexpressing Arabidopsis GolS2 and SRK2C genes which are known as salt- and drought-stress tolerance genes. First, five independent lines each of transgenic plants in which the Arabidopsis genes were highly expressed were selected by using RT-PCR. Second, we examined the method of propagation of transgenic plants. And then, we investigated conditions of salt stress effective for evaluation: (1) the rooting rate after transfer of shoot explants onto solid medium containing 30 mM NaCl and (2) the observation of growth of soil-grown plants in 100 - 150 mM NaCl condition. In addition, we would like to report on the results of ongoing microarray analysis of the transgenic poplar plants.