Effection Of Sulfur Nutrition On The Gene Expression Of Maize Sulfate Transporter And ATP Sulfurylase Under Drought Condition

Drought is one of the severe constraints on farming. One of the important pathways in the resolution to drought is to increasing the drought tolerance of crops. Sulfur is an essential element in crops nutrition, which plays a vital role in crop growth and metabolism. It has been reported that Sulfur nutrition do direct contribution to the growth of plant, advancing the efficiency on water using , decrease some harm parameters causing by drought, which is good for the plant to resist drought. It is still not clear about the molecular mechanism of how sulphur works in improving the ability of plant to resist drought, further study need to be done.Sulfate transporter and ATP sulfurylase are two prime and basic regulation sites on sulfate assimilation pathway. Therefore, to study the expression of sulphate transporter ATP sulfurylase under different water and sulfur condition would provide a preliminary research of the function of sulfur in helping crops fighting against drought on a molecular level.Total RNA was extracted from the roots of a type of high-sensitive-to-drought and sulphur nutrition maize and RT-PCR was proceeded for cloning a piece of sulphate transporter gene and ATP sulfurylase geneSequencing was done after they linked to cloning vector pGEM-Teasy. Sequence alignments showed that these partial pieces separately belong to high affinity sulphate transporter of maize and a kind of plastid ATP sulfurylase. After random labeling with DIG, RNA dot blot was proceeded to test the expression of this gene under different growth condition. Results showed that the expression of this gene was positive regulated by sulphate starvation, and comparing with the sample treated with sufficient water, the expression of these two genes increase under drought when both of them are sulphur deficiency.By measuring of contents of MDA, Pro, GSH and activity of ATPS of the maize leaves, it shows that sulphur can enhance the adaptation to drought of maize, seems that drought makes plant uptake more sulphur.All these results provided a preliminary discussion of the function of sulfur in helping crops fighting against drought on a molecular level, and partial genes of sulfate transporter and ATP sulfurylase are cloned, providing information and base for further study on plant anti-drought.