Abstract
Drought is a major abiotic stress in agriculture that severely affects crop growth, yield, and quality. The APETALA2/ethylene responsive factor (AP2/ERF) plays a crucial role in maintaining plant growth, development, as well as stress tolerance. Herein, we cloned and characterized the MhERF113-like gene from Malus hupehensis. MhERF113-like is significantly induced by drought and highly expressed in leaves. Overexpression of MhERF113-like positively regulated the drought tolerance of apple callus, as judged by less electrolyte leakage, lower malonaldehyde (MDA) and hydrogen peroxide (H2O2) contents in OE than those of the WT apple callus under drought stress. In addition, ectopic expression of MhERF113-like gene in tomatoes improved the drought tolerance, accompanied by enhanced expression of antioxidant genes (SlAPX and SlSOD) and stress responsive genes (SlDREB2A and SlRD29), and reduced H2O2 and O2- contents in transgenic tomato. Taken together, our study demonstrated that MhERF113-like may play an important role in the regulation of plant drought tolerance, which may provide a key factor for future biotechnology applications to improve drought stress tolerance in plants.