Abstract
Plants exploit numerous strategies to adapt to changes in their environment. The development of plants with enhanced tolerance to abiotic environmental stress, such as drought, salinity and heat stress should enhance crop yield. Regulators of transcription are important in the acclimation of plants to environmental stresses, and several have been shown to confer tolerance to abiotic stress. Because some loss-of-function mutants have elevated tolerance to abiotic stresses, we postulated that application of CRES-T (Chimeric REpressor gene Silencing Technology) might allow the generation of factors that can improve tolerance to abiotic stress. We show here that five independent chimeric repressors derived from MYB, NAC, GARP, C2H2ZnF and ERF transcription factors confer tolerance to salt or osmotic stress in Arabidopsis. We also show that chimeric repressors derived from rice homologs of two of these factors confer salt tolerance on rice plants. Furthermore, negative regulator(s) that is involved in abiotic stress tolerance will be discussed.
