Poster: Genomic & proteomic resources

Abs # 900: Differentially Expressed Genes During Drought And Heat Stress in Cotton (Gossypium hirsutum)

Presenter:	Cong, Peisheng , congpei@auburn.edu
Authors	Cong, Peisheng  (A)   Singh, Narendra K. (A)   Cherry, Joe H. (A)   Locy, Robert D. (A)
Affiliations:	(A): Auburn University

Cotton is the most important fiber crop in the world. In the past 10 years much effort has been focused on cotton biotechnology and fiber quality improvement by the means of bio-molecular and transgenic techniques. However, little molecular work has focused on the growth and development of vegetative tissues of cotton, including environmental stress tolerance in cotton. In this research we use differential display analysis to study cotton gene expression under osmotic (drought) and heat stress. For the osmotic stress, more than 40 sequences appear to be significantly down-regulated, while about 15 sequences appear up-regulated by osmotic stress, and about 30 sequences are newly induced by the drought stress. For heat stress, there are about 50 down-regulated sequences and about 30 sequences whose expression disappear in response to heat. About 70 sequences are newly induced. Of these 70 newly induced sequences, about 20 of them are induced by 2-hour stress treatment at 46 C (short time heat stress), and about 50 sequences are induced by 20-hour continuous stress treatment at 46C (continuous heat stress). By cloning all differentially expressed sequences, sequencing the clones, and searching using the BLAST search utility we have identified approximately 30 sequences that code for known genes. However, 60 additional sequences do not show significant similarity with any known gene sequence. Further research will focus on the determination of these unknown sequences and characterization of the known genes.