Abstract:

Growth and development of plant are heavily influenced by abiotic stress. In recent years, different resistant genes have been cloned and transferred into less resistant species. It was attempted to improve crops for their resistance to abiotic stress. In most cases, however, forceful constitutive promoter was used to promote over expression of stress gene. This was disadvantageous to some activities of physiological metabolism, although the transgenic plant was improved for its stress resistance. In this study, stress inducible promoter mwcs120 was cloned by specific PCR from wheat genomic DNA. Sequence analysis showed that this promoter was 97.1% homologous with cold inducible promoter wcs120. Even though mutations were found at two locations, conservative elements for stress regulation were still kept unchanged. Transient expression experiment indicated that, both in monocotyledonous and dicotyledonous plants, promoter mwcs120 was induced by low temperature and high salt stress to increase expression of gene GUS. Therefore, promoter mwcs120 was hopeful to be used to gene engineering of crop improvement for stress resistance.

Key words: Stress, Inducible promoter, Cloning, Transient expression