Under Drought Stress

A commonly referred ‘false flax or gold-of-pleasure Camelina sativa has been interested as one of biofuel feedstocks. The species can grow on marginal land due to superior drought tolerance and low requirement of agricultural inputs. Use of gene-specific molecular markers is an important strategy for new cultivar development in our breeding program. Automated sequencing tool along with bioinformatics was adopted to obtain expression profiling of genes responding to drought stress in the Camelina species. A total of assembled loci were more than 60,000, which corresponds to about 275K transcripts for the loci. Compared to control, up-regulated genes were 107, 2,989 and 982 when the species was exposed to 10, 100 kPa, and rehydrated conditions, respectively. Similarly down-regulated genes were 146, 3,659 and 1,189 for the three drought regimes, respectively. There are some unknown genes which were highly expressed at drought condition, but already reported gene families such as senescence-associated genes, CAP160, LEA at 100 kPa soil water condition, and cysteine protease, 2OG and Fe(II)-dependent oxygenase, RAD-like 1 at rehydrated condition. Those genes will be further validated and mapped for the function and genic loci. This EST library will be favorably applied to development of gene-specific molecular markers and discovering of genes responsible for drought tolerance in the Camelina species.