Heat- and wound-responsive genes in Nicotiana benthamiana

Nicotiana benthamiana is a widely used organism for expression of foreign proteins. To increase protein abundance, overexpression promoters have been developed. However, several proteins cause negative effects on plant growth and development when they are overexpressed. Therefore, overexpression promoters cannot be widely used to generate transgenic plants that produce foreign proteins. In this study, we tried to find stress-inducible promoters which specifically express downstream genes when plants were exposed to stress conditions. By RNA-sequencing analysis of heat- and wound-treated plants, we found that NbHSP20 promoters can be used as a heat-inducible promoters to express foreign proteins in N. benthamiana. For analyzing heat-responsive genes, N.benthamiana plants were incubated at 37oC for 1 h. For wound-responsive genes, N.benthamiana plants were wounded and then incubated at 23oC for 1 h. Three biological replicates for mock, heat, and wound samples were analyzed. Control: mock