Screening of ZAT12 and GlyII wheat transgenics using seedling based assays for stress tolerance

Abstract

Single copy transgenics of Agrobacterium mediated wheat transformants
were available for two genes- Zat12 and GlyII in the background of
wheat cultivar DPW 621-50. Three homozygous transgenic lines
carrying ZAT12 and three carrying GlyII were subjected to preliminary
screening for water deficit and salinity stress respectively. An initial
experiment was carried out to standardize the concentrations of PEG
and NaCl using parental non- transformed line DPW 621-50. Seedlings
were grown in vermiculite in propagation trays in a growth chamber
maintained at 200C ± 20C, 8/16 hours dark/light ZAT 12 homozygous
progenies were screening using PEG at 25% and 30% concentration.
Transgenics Z-8-12 and Z-15-10 showed significant improvement for
shoot and root traits under PEG induced water deficit stress. In the
best transgenic line, 45%, 20%, 33%, 22%, 24%and 20% improvement
over DPW 621-50 was observed for root length, shoot length, fresh
root weight, root dry weight, shoot fresh weight and shoot dry weight
respectively under stress conditions. In a parallel experiment, all
the three GlyII transgenics showed marked superiority over parental
cultivar DPW 621-50. The best GlyII transgenic showed 25%, 19%,
12%, 22%, 26% and 22% improvement over PBW 621 for root length,
shoot length, fresh root weight, root dry weight, shoot fresh weight
and shoot dry weight respectively under stress conditions.