Balancing growth amidst salt stress - lifestyle perspectives from the extremophyte model Schrenkiella parvula.

Schrenkiella parvula, a leading extremophyte model in Brassicaceae, can grow and complete its lifecycle under multiple environmental stresses, including high salinity. Yet, the key physiological and structural traits underlying its stress-adapted lifestyle are unknown along with trade-offs when surviving salt stress at the expense of growth and reproduction. We aimed to identify the influential adaptive trait responses that lead to stress-resilient and uncompromised growth across developmental stages when treated with salt at levels known to inhibit growth in Arabidopsis and most crops.

Divergence in the ABA gene regulatory network underlies differential growth control.

The phytohormone abscisic acid (ABA) is a central regulator of acclimation to environmental stress; however, its contribution to differences in stress tolerance between species is unclear. To establish a comparative framework for understanding how stress hormone signalling pathways diverge across species, we studied the growth response of four Brassicaceae species to ABA treatment and generated transcriptomic and DNA affinity purification and sequencing datasets to construct a cross-species gene regulatory network (GRN) for ABA. Comparison of genes bound directly by ABA-responsive element binding factors suggests that cis-factors are most important for determining the target loci represented in the ABA GRN of a particular species.

Plant Growth and Agrobacterium-mediated Floral-dip Transformation of the Extremophyte Schrenkiella parvula.

Schrenkiella parvula is an extremophyte adapted to various abiotic stresses, including multiple ion toxicity stresses. Despite high-quality genomic resources available to study how plants adapt to environmental stresses, its value as a functional genomics model and tool has been limited by the lack of a feasible transformation system. In this protocol, we report how to generate stable transgenic S.

Transcriptomic view of survival during early seedling growth of the extremophyte Haloxylon ammodendron.

Seedling establishment in an extreme environment requires an integrated genomic and physiological response to survive multiple abiotic stresses. The extremophyte, Haloxylon ammodendron is a pioneer species capable of colonizing temperate desert sand dunes. We investigated the induced and basal transcriptomes in H.

Making Epidermal Bladder Cells Bigger: Developmental- and Salinity-Induced Endopolyploidy in a Model Halophyte.

Endopolyploidy occurs when DNA replication takes place without subsequent mitotic nuclear division, resulting in cell-specific ploidy levels within tissues. In plants, endopolyploidy plays an important role in sustaining growth and development, but only a few studies have demonstrated a role in abiotic stress response. In this study, we investigated the function of ploidy level and nuclear and cell size in leaf expansion throughout development and tracked cell type-specific ploidy in the halophyte In addition to developmental endopolyploidy, we examined the effects of salinity stress on ploidy level.