Yan Liu¹ , Jing Kou¹ , Tetsuo Takano² , Shenkui Liu¹ , Yuanyuan Bu¹

1 Key Laboratory of Saline-Alkali Vegetation Ecology Restoration in Oil Field (SAVER), Ministry of Education, Alkali Soil Natural Environmental Science Center (ASNESC), Northeast Forestry University, Harbin 150040, P.R. China
2 Asian Natural Environmental Science Center (ANESC), The University of Tokyo, Tokyo 188-0002, Japan
Author    Correspondence author
Molecular Soil Biology, 2017, Vol. 8, No. 1   doi: 10.5376/msb.2017.08.0001
Received: 20 Jan., 2017    Accepted: 16 Feb., 2017    Published: 27 Feb., 2017

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Liu Y., Kou J., Takano T., Liu S.K., and Bu Y.Y., 2017, Overexpression of AtGS1.5 gene improves salt stress tolerance during seed germination in Arabidopsis thaliana, Molecular Soil Biology, 8(1): 1-6 (doi: 10.5376/msb.2017.08.0001)

Salt stress is one of the major abiotic stress that limits crop growth, development and production, it is a growing problem for agricultural-wordwide. Seed germination is a critical stage in the development of crops that grow in saline soils. An improved understanding of molecular mechanism to NaCl treatment on seed germination may has important significance for development of crops with increased tolerance to NaCl stress. In this study, we carried out the studies of A.thaliana glutamine synthetase (AtGS1.5) responses to salt stress during seed germination. The results show that the AtGS1.5 overexpression transgenic Arabidopsis plants enhance the tolerance to salt stress comparable to that of wild type (WT) and Arabidopsis AtGS1.5 mutants (atgs1.5) plants. Furthermore, overexpression of AtGS1.5 gene increased the activity of glutamine synthase and decreased NH₄⁺ content in transgenic plants.

Salt tolerance; Seed germination; Glutamine synthetase; Arabidopsis thaliana