Yuanqing Jiang
College of Life Sciences, Northwest A&F University

Plants are frequently challenged with a variety of abiotic stresses, including drought, high salinity, cold, low potassium and phosphorus. Understanding how plants respond and adapt to these stress conditions will help us to develop stress-tolerant crops, and to meet the increasing demand on the quality and quantity of food. In the past few decades, great progress has been achieved in identifying some of the key genes and signaling pathways involved in abiotic stress responses, mostly through working with the model plant-Arabidopsis. However, much is still unknown.
Calcium is the second messenger in plant cells, and calcineurin B-like proteins (CBLs) and their targets (CBL-interacting protein kinases [CIPKs]) as well as calcium-dependent protein kinase (CDPKs) are emerging paradigm for Ca2+ decoding in plants. Transcription factors, like those of MYB, WRKY and NAC families, have been found to play very important roles in plant response to many different stress conditions and hormone stimuli. Canola (Brassica napus L.) is an important edible oil-producing crop in both China and worldwide, and its genome demonstrates an overall of more than 85% homology to that of Arabidopsis, facilitating our research. Through high-throughput microarray analysis with both Arabidopsis and Canola, combined with Arabidopsis mutant characterization, we have identified a few novel calcium-related protein kinase genes as well as a few new transcription factor genes that regulate plant response to ABA, salinity and low potassium treatments. To identify the target genes of those novel protein kinases and transcription factors, we have screened yeast two-hybrid libraries and identified some interesting protein-protein interactions. Using a combination of physiological, biochemical, and molecular biology strategies, we are now dissecting their functions. Our work will help to better understand the signaling pathways in plants under stress conditions and also to improve crops’ tolerance to abiotic stresses in the future.