Genome-Wide Analysis of AP2/ERF Family Genes in Lotus corniculatus Shows LcERF054 and LcERF080 Enhance Salt Tolerance

摘要

Soil salinity is one of the most important abiotic stress problems that inhibit growth and reduce the potential yields of crop plants. Deciphering the mechanism of plants salt stress response is of critical importance for the development of rational breeding and transgenic strategies leading to salt stress tolerance in plants (Zhou et al. 2010). Apetala2/Ethylene response factor (AR2/ERF) is a large, and one of the most important families of plant-specific transcription factors which binds to some specific cis-acting elements for the regulation of many stress-related gene expression (Sakuma et al. 2002; Mizoi et al. 2012). On the basis of the number of AP2/ERF domains encoded and the gene function, the AP2/ERF gene family has been divided into foursubfamilies named the AP2 (which contains two AP2 domains), C-repeat binding factor (CBF)ZDREB (single AP2 domain, A-subfamily), ERF (single AP2 domain, B-subfamily), and RAV (related to ABI3/VP1, thus have a B3 domain in addition to the AP2 domain) (Sakuma et al. 2002; Nakano et al. 2006).