Isolation and Analysis of Drought-Induced Genes in Maize Roots

Maize roots are important component for plant adaptation to soil water deficits because they are supposed to take up water and necessary solutes from the soil. In the present study, the drought-induced genes were isolated in maize roots. A suppression subtractive hybridization protocol was applied to construct a forward subtractive cDNA library from CN165 for drought-stressed maize roots and a number of drought-induced genes were isolated. Totally, 126 uniESTs (containing 82 singlets and 44 contigs) were obtained from 503 available ESTs sequences after macroarray hybridization. UniESTs were analyzed using BLASTN and BLASTX and the results showed that 92% of the uniESTs had homolgous sequences in maize nr database by BLASTN. About 89% of uniESTs appeared the homlogous amino acid sequences in rice protein database but not in maize protein database by BLASTX, implying that those genes are likely new functional genes in maize. Function analysis showed that those genes were involved in a broad spectrum of biological pathways, mainly in signaling and regulatory pathways related to stress tolerance.