Exploiting Differential Gene Expression to Discover Ionic and Osmotic-Associated Transcripts in the Halophyte Grass Aeluropus littoralis

BACKGROUND: Salinity as a most significant environmental challenges affects the growth and productivity of plants worldwide. In this study, the ionic and iso-osmotic effects of salt stress were investigated in Aeluropus littoralis L., a halophyte grass species from Poaceae family, by cDNA-amplified fragment length polymorphism (cDNA-AFLP) technique. To dissect the two different effects (ionic and osmotic) exerted by salt stress, various ionic agents including 200 and 400 mM sodium chloride (NaCl), 200 and 400 mM potassium chloride (KCl) as well as 280 and 406 gl(− 1) (− 0.9 and − 1.4 MPa) polyethylene glycol 6000 (PEG) as their iso-osmotic concentrations were applied. RESULTS: Application of KCl and PEG significantly reduced the fresh weight (FW) of A. littoralis seedlings compared to control while NaCl treatment markedly enhanced the FW. At the transcriptome level, different observations of changes in gene expression have been made in response of A. littoralis to ionic and osmotic stresses. Out of 69 transcript derived fragments (TDFs), 42 TDFs belong to 9 different groups of genes involved in metabolism (11.6%), transcription (10.2%), ribosomal protein (8.7%), protein binding (8.7%) transporter (5.8%), translation (5.8%), signal transduction (4.3%), nucleosome assembly protein (2.9%) and catabolism (2.9%). The 44 and 28 percent of transcripts were expressed under ionic stress (NaCl-specific and KCl-specific) and osmotic stress (common with NaCl, KCl and PEG), respectively which indicating a greater response of plants to ionic stress than osmotic stress. Expression pattern of eight candidate TDFs including; SYP81, CAND1, KATN, ISB1, SAMDC, GLY1, HAK18 and ZF30 was evaluated by RT-qPCR at high salinity levels and recovery condition. CONCLUSION: Differential regulation of these TDFs was observed in root and shoot which confirm their role in salt stress tolerance and provide initial insights into the transcriptome of A. littoralis. Expression pattern of ionic and osmotic-related TDFs at A. littoralis can be taken as an indication of their functional relevance at different salt and drought stresses.