A method to confer salinity stress tolerance to plants by helicase overexpression

Abstract

High salinity stress adversely affects plant growth and limits agricultural production worldwide. To minimize these losses it is essential to develop stress-tolerant plants. Several genes, including the genes encoding for helicases, are induced in response to salinity stress. Helicases are ubiquitous motor enzymes that catalyze the unwinding of energetically stable duplex DNA (DNA helicases) or duplex RNA secondary structures (RNA helicases) in an ATP-dependent manner. Helicase members of DEAD-box protein family play essential roles in cellular processes that regulate plant growth and development. Overexpression of one helicase in plant by using Agrobacterium tumefaciens-mediated transformation system confers salinity stress tolerance. To develop the salinity stress tolerant transgenic plants several sequential steps are required including cloning the helicase gene into plant transformation vector, transformation of the gene into Agrobacterium followed by Agrobacterium-mediated transformation of the gene into plant, selection and regeneration of the transgenic plants, confirmation of transgenic plants by PCR or GUS assay, and finally analysis of transgenic plants (T 0 and T 1 generations) for salinity stress tolerance. © 2009 Humana Press, a part of Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.