ERF5 drought and salt in tomato.pdf

ORIGINAL PAPER An ethylene response factor (ERF5) promoting adaptation to drought and salt tolerance in tomato Yu Pan ? Graham B. Seymour ? Chungui Lu ? Zongli Hu ? Xuqing Chen ? Guoping Chen Received: 2 August 2011 / Revised: 28 September 2011 / Accepted: 5 October 2011 / Published online: 22 October 2011  Springer-Verlag 2011 Abstract A novel member of the AP2/ERF transcription factor family, SlERF5, was identified from a tomato mature leaf cDNA library screen. The complete DNA sequence of SlERF5 encodes a putative 244-amino acid DNA-binding protein which most likely acts as a transcriptional regulator and is a member of the ethylene responsive factor (ERF) superfamily. Analysis of the deduced SlERF5 protein sequence showed that it contained an ERF domain and belonged to the class III group of ERFs proteins. Expression of SlERF5 was induced by abiotic stress, such as high salinity, drought, flooding, wounding and cold temperatures. Over-expression of SlERF5 in transgenic tomato plants resulted in high tolerance to drought and salt stress and increased levels of relative water content compared with wild-type plants. This study indicates that SlERF5 is mainly involved in the responses to abiotic stress in tomato. Keywords Drought stress  Ethylene response factor  SlERF5  Salt stress  Solanum lycopersicum Introduction Plant adaptation to environmental stresses relies upon the activation of molecular networks involved in stress per- ception, signal transduction, and the expression of specific stress-related genes and metabolites (Vinocur and Altman 2005). Candidate genes for stress tolerance include stress sensors, histidine kinases, receptor-like protein kinases, calcium sensors, calcium-binding proteins, calcium- dependent protein kinases (CDPKs), mitogen-activated The accession number for the ethylene response factor5 (ERF5) cDNA nucleotide sequence is AY559315, which was previously named tomato ERF5 gene (LeERF5), is now renamed SlERF5; the accession number f