Overexpression of AtABCG36 improves drought and salt stress resistance in Arabidopsis

Drought and salt are major abiotic stresses that adversely affect crop productivity. Thus, identification of factors that confer resistance to these stresses would pave way to increasing agricultural productivity. When grown on soil in green house longer than 5 weeks, transgenic Arabidopsis plants that overexpress an ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporter, AtABCG36/AtPDR8, produced higher shoot biomass and less chlorotic leaves than the wild-type. We investigated whether the improved growth of AtABCG36-overexpressing plants was due to their improved resistance to abiotic stresses, and found that AtABCG36-overexpressing plants were more resistant to drought and salt stress and grew to higher shoot fresh weight (FW) than the wild-type. On the contrary, T-DNA insertional knockout lines were more sensitive to drought stress than wild-type and were reduced in shoot FW. To understand the mechanism of enhanced salt and drought resistance of the AtABCG36 overexpressing plants, we measured sodium contents and found that AtABCG36 overexpressing plants were lower in sodium content than the wild-type. Our data suggest that AtABCG36 contributes to drought and salt resistance in Arabidopsis by a mechanism that includes reduction of sodium content in plants.