Transcriptional profiling of alkaline stress-induced defense responses in soybean (Glycine max)

Alkaline stress has been considered a major environmental threat to plant growth and agricultural production. Even though the mechanisms have been characterized in some plants, the information about the alkaline stress-induced defense responses in soybean is insufficient. To identify defense related genes, the transcriptional profiles of soybean seedlings were examined using RNA sequencing under alkaline stress. The results showed that a total of 4603 genes were up-regulated and 1659 were down-regulated compared to expression in control plants. Further, the functional enrichment analysis showed that these differentially expressed genes were significantly enriched in 43 pathways and mainly associated with catalytic activity and binding, metabolic process, cellular process and cell progress. Then, 19 transcription factors from AP2-EREBF, MYB families and isoflavone related genes were chosen and identified to be induced under alkaline stress by quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). Taken together, our results highlight the differentially expressed genes and identify a set of genes associated with the response to alkaline stress, which findings establish a foundation for further analyses of soybean alkaline stress tolerance mechanisms.Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13102818.2021.1976078 .