Overexpression of OsNAC14 improves drought tolerance in rice. Overexpression of OsNAC14 improves drought tolerance in rice

Plants have evolved to possess adaptation mechanism to cope with drought stress by reprograming transcriptional networks through drought responsive transcription factors, which in turn mediate morphological and physiological changes. NAM, ATAF1-2, and CUC2 (NAC) transcription factors are known to be associated with various developmental processes and stress tolerance. In this study, we functionally characterized the rice drought responsive NAC transcription factor OsNAC14. OsNAC14 was predominantly induced at meiosis stage, and induced by drought, high salinity, ABA and low temperature in leaves than roots. Overexpression of OsNAC14 resulted in drought tolerance at the vegetative growth stage and enhanced filling rate at vegetative growth. OsNAC14 overexpression elevated expression of genes related to DNA damage repair, defense response, strigolactone biosynthesis, which correlated with resistance to drought tolerance. Furthermore, OsNAC14 directly bound to the promoter of drought inducible OsRAD51A1, a key component in homologous recombination in DNA repair system. These results indicate that OsNAC14 mediate drought tolerance by recruiting factors involved in DNA damage repair and defense response to enable plant to protect from cellular damage caused by drought stress, thereby provide mechanism for drought tolerance. Overall design: RNA-seq using leaves of NT (nontransgenic plants), PGD1:OsNAC14 transgenic plants that were generated by deep sequencing using Illumina Hiseq 2500.