Abstract:
The static nature of plants restrains their potential to evade heat stress and requires them to withstand stress through inherent defence abilities. Prosopis cineraria is a leguminous phreatophyte distributed across arid and semi-arid regions of India and can tolerate very high temperatures due to its adaptive physiological and biochemical mechanisms. Therefore, P. cineraria represents a repository of genes for abiotic stress tolerance. Two-months-old P. cineraria plants were subjected to heat stress at two different temperature regimes and transcriptome sequencing was performed to identify differentially expressed genes (DEGs). A total of 1151 and 1562 DEGs were observed in response to 45℃ and 55℃ heat stress compared to control, respectively, indicating that 55℃ treatment has a pronounced effect on P. cineraria. The transcriptomic data highlighted the potential role of multiple gene families and their interactions for high thermotolerance of P. cineraria. The expression of a few representative heat stress-responsive genes was validated with real-time qPCR. The in-depth bioinformatic analysis provided the detailed transcriptome profiling, supported by its validation, and new insights for important abiotic stress-related genes from thermotolerant P. cineraria, which can be used for crop improvement.