Guard cell and whole plant expression of Arabidopsis thaliana TOR

Water use efficiency has long been considered as an important target for the breeding of improved plant performance under drought. Minimizing leaf transpirational water loss via reduction of stomatal water conductance plays a key contributory role in drought resistance. In this study, we employed both guard cell (GC) targeted and constitutive ectopic overexpression of the Target of Rapamycin (TOR) kinase, a master regulator of multiple signaling networks in transgenic Arabidopsis thaliana, to investigate the impact of these expressed AtTOR transgenes in response to drought and water use efficiency. We performed genome-wide transcriptome analysis employing RNA-seq on the three Arabidopsis genotypes grown on the three water treatments, and further analysis will be used to elucidate the potential mechanism(s) contributing to differences in leaf stomatal physiology between WT and transgenic lines. We investigate the transcriptome of 27 samples from the three treatments (well-watered, drought-treated and re-watered) of the three genotypes (WT, GC, OE), with three replicates for each condition and genotype.