BULK SEGREGANT TRANSCRIPTOME ANALYSIS BASED DIFFERENTIAL EXPRESSION OF DROUGHT RESPONSE GENESIN MAIZE.

Drought stress is the major threat to maize development and production. Here the bulked segregant transcriptome analysis (BSTA) was applied to discover the molecular mechanisms of drought stress responses in maize. The evaluation of drought stress tolerance was contacted for 200 maize inbred lines. Two bulk pools were constructed by selecting 10 inbred lines that were tolerant to drought (TD) and other 10that were sensitive to drought (SD). BSTA was performed to identify the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) within two kinds of maize under drought treatment. A total of 4886 and 5274 DEGs were detected in TD and SD bulk pools, respectively. The functional annotations showed that most of the DEGs are involved in the hormone metabolism, transcription regulation and alternative splicing pathways. Comparisons of the DEGs between two bulk pools revealed that the number of up-regulated genes related to alternative splicing in TD bulk pool was significantly higher than that in SD bulk pool. Besides, 928 up-regulated genes and 346 down-regulated genes among 1274 DEGs were identified including protein kinase andtranscription factors only in TD bulk pool. This result indicates that many common mechanisms are involved in drought regulation, moreover alternative splicing may play dominant role in response to drought stress in maize. Our results contribute to understand the mechanisms of drought stress tolerance of maize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]