Overexpression of OsTZF8, a CCCH-Tandem Zinc finger, increases drought tolerance in rice by regulating stress related genes

Purpose: Next-generation sequencing (NGS) has been utilized for systems-based analysis of rice plants. The goals of this study were to compare the transcriptome between non-transgenic (NT) control and OsTZF8 overexpressing transgenic plants. Methods: Total RNAs were extracted from the whole plants of OsTZF8 overexpressing plants (T4 generation, line number #20) and non-transgenic (NT) plant using RNeasy plant mini kit (Qiagen, Germany) according to the manufacturer's instruction. cDNA libraries were prepared from total RNAs using TruSeq RNA sample Prep kit (v2) (Macrogen, Korea). Two biological replicates were analyzed by RNA-sequencing analysis. Single-end sequences were obtained using IRGSP (v 1.0) and raw sequence reads were trimmed to remove adaptor sequence, and those with a quality lower than Q20 were removed using the Trimmomatic 0.32 software (Bolger et al., 2014). To map the reads to reference genome, all reads were assembled with annotated genes from the Rap-DB database [http://rapdb.dna.affrc.go.jp; IRGSP (v 1.0)] using TopHat software (https://ccb.jhu.edu/software/tophat/index.shtml). Conclusions: Our study has identified downstream candidate genes regulated by overexpression of OsTZF8. Overall design: Non-transgenic (NT) control and OsTZF8 overexpressing trangenic plants were grown in soil for three weeks. Three-week-old plants were harvested and used for RNA-sequencing analysis to identify differentially expressed genes between NT and OsTZF8 overexpressing transgenic rice plants.