Proceedings of the XLVII Italian Society of Agricultural Genetics - SIGA Annual Congress

Verona, Italy - 24/27 September, 2003

ISBN 88-900622-4-X

Poster Abstract - 1.16

IDENTIFICATION OF SEQUENCES RELATED TO DROUGHT STRESS IN DURUM WHEAT

P. RAMPINO*, M. MALATRASI**, M. GULLÌ**, N. MARMIROLI**, P. PERROTTA*

*) Department of Biological and Environmental Sciences and Technologies, University of Lecce

**) Department of Environmental Science, University of Parma

drought stress, wheat, differential display

Drought is one of the adverse environmental factors causing severe yield loss in crop plants. Plants have developed different strategies to cope with this stress, involving changes in the pattern of gene expression due to activation of stress-specific genes and to a general re-programming of genetic activity in the cell. Ten day-old seedlings of two cultivars of durum wheat sensitive to drought to varying degrees (cv Adamello, more sensitive and cv Ofanto less sensitive) were subjected to dehydration for 2, 4 and 6 hours. Total RNA extracted from these samples was used for PCR analysis using different primer sets. The first set of primers was designed on dehydrin conserved sequences, selected from drought-specific sequences found in databases. For the second set of primers, the EST database was used to select sequences obtained from drought-specific libraries. A third set was designed on the sequences of some DDRT clones corresponding to mRNAs expressed in barley after cold or drought treatments. The difference in the induction of the transcripts corresponding to the selected primers was analysed by RT-PCR, after the different stress conditions. RT-PCR analysis demonstrated that the level of transcripts increased under drought stress but at a different rate in the two cultivars.