Construction of two regulatory networks related to salt stress and lignocellulosic synthesis under salt stress based on a Populus davidiana x P. bolleana transcriptome analysis

Key message Construction of ML-hGRN for the salt pathway in Populus davidiana x P. bolleana. Construction of ML-hGRN for the lignocellulosic pathway in Populus davidiana x P. bolleana under salt stress. Many woody plants, including Populus davidiana x P. bolleana, have made great contributions to human production and life. High salt is one of the main environmental factors that restricts the growth of poplar. This study found that high salt could induce strong biochemical changes in poplar. To detect the effect of salt treatment on gene expression, 18 libraries were sequenced on the Illumina sequencing platform. The results identified a large number of early differentially expressed genes (DEGs) and a small number of late DEGs, which indicated that most of the salt response genes of poplar were early response genes. In addition, 197 TFs, including NAC, ERF, and other TFs related to salt stress, were differentially expressed during salt treatment, which indicated that these TFs may play an important role in the salt stress response of poplar. Based on the RNA-seq analysis results, multilayered hierarchical gene regulatory networks (ML-hGRNs) of salt stress- and lignocellulosic synthesis-related DEGs were constructed using the GGM algorithm. The lignocellulosic synthesis regulatory network under salt stress revealed that lignocellulosic synthesis might play an important role in the process of salt stress resistance. Furthermore, the NAC family transcription factor PdbNAC83, which was found in the upper layer in both pathways, was selected to verify the accuracy of the ML-hGRNs. DAP-seq showed that the binding site of PdbNAC83 included a "TT(G/A)C(G/T)T" motif, and ChIP-PCR further verified that PdbNAC83 can regulate the promoters of at least six predicted downstream genes (PdbNLP2-2, PdbZFP6, PdbMYB73, PdbC2H2-like, PdbMYB93-1, PdbbHLH094) by binding to the "TT(G/A)C(G/T)T" motif, which indicates that the predicted regulatory network diagram obtained in this study is relatively accurate. In conclusion, a species-specific salt response pathway might exist in poplar, and this finding lays a foundation for further study of the regulatory mechanism of the salt stress response and provides new clues for the use of genetic engineering methods to create high-quality and highly resistant forest germplasms.