Unveiling DREB30: A Key Player in Wheat's Battle Against Combined Drought and Heat Stress

Abstract

Abstract Dehydration-responsive element-binding protein (DREB) is a transcription factor specific to plants, capable of selectively binding to DRE/CRT elements in reaction to abiotic stresses, such as drought. DREB proteins play a crucial role in increasing a plant's tolerance to drought stress by enabling water conservation, maintaining cellular homeostasis, and alleviating the adverse impacts of drought on growth and development. In the present investigation an amplicon of ~ 858 bp was amplified from C306 wheat cultivar. With accession number OP057913, the gene was submitted to the NCBI Gen Bank. BLASTn search revealed the highest similarity with the ethylene-responsive transcription factor ERF060-like gene from Triticum aestivum. In plants DREB30 is localized in chloroplast. The cloned DREB30 gene has open reading frame (ORF) of 281 amino acids. Conserved domain search analysis showed it belongs to AP2 superfamily. qRT-PCR analysis of the DREB30 gene showed maximum expression in leaves compared to roots under combined stress treatment during both the pollination and grain-filling stages. Our study revealed that combined stress has a severe effect on the relative water content (RWC) and photosynthetic parameters compared to individual stress. Antioxidant enzymes SOD, Catalase, GPx were observed to be increased more under combined stress. The occurrence of combined stress led to a greater increase in Proline (40.56%) and TAC (30%) accumulation compared to the control. Among genotypes HD3226 was severely affected, C306 was least affected by combined stress. We propose that DREB30 emerges as a promising candidate gene for enhancing plant resilience against both drought and heat stress.