Abstract Drought and high-salinity are the important existing in TERF1 targeted gene promoters. Our results
constraints that severely affect plant development and crop revealed that ectopic expression of TERF1 in rice caused a
yield worldwide. It has been established that ethylene series of molecular and physiological alterations and
response factor (ERF) proteins play important regulatory resulted in the transgenic rice with enhanced tolerance to
roles in plant response to abiotic and biotic stresses. Our abiotic stress, indicating that TERF1 might have similar
previous researches have revealed that transgenic tobacco regulatory roles in response to abiotic stress in tobacco and
over-expressing TERF1 (encoding a tomato ERF protein) rice.
showed enhanced tolerance to abiotic stress. Here, we
further investigate the function of TERF1 in transgenic Keywords ERF protein Drought Oryza sativa
rice. Compared with the wild-type plants, overexpression Salinity Transcriptional regulation
of TERF1 resulted in an increased tolerance to drought and
high-salt in transgenic rice. And the enhanced tolerance
may be associated with the accumulation of proline and the Introduction
decrease of water loss. Furthermore, TERF1 can effec-
tively regulate the expression of stress-related functional Various environmental stresses severely affect plant
genes Lip5, Wcor413-l, OsPrx and OsABA2, as well as developmental processes and cause yield loss worldwide.
regulatory genes OsCDPK7, OsCDPK13 and OsCDPK19 Among abiotic stresses, drought is the most devastating
under normal growth conditions. Our analyses of cis-acting constraint to crop productivity and regional distribution
elements show that there exist DRE/CRT and/or GCC-box (Mahajan and Tuteja 2005; Valliyodan and Nguyen 2006).
As a consequence of dehydration, many physiological
changes occur in the cell including adjustment of metab-
Shumei Gao, Haiwen Zhang and Yun Tian contributed equally to this olism and accumulation of protective compounds. These
work. alterations are highly associated with maintaining cellular
morphology and stabilizing membrane proteins under
Communicated by W.-H. Wu.