Natural Variants of AtHKT1 Enhance Na+ Accumulation in Two Wild Populations of Arabidopsis

Abstract

Plants are sessile and therefore have developed mechanisms to adapt to their environment, including the soil mineral nutrient composition. Ionomics is a developing functional genomic strategy designed to rapidly identify the genes and gene networks involved in regulating how plants acquire and accumulate these mineral nutrients from the soil. Here, we report on the coupling of high-throughput elemental profiling of shoot tissue from various Arabidopsis accessions with DNA microarray-based bulk segregant analysis and reverse genetics, for the rapid identification of genes from wild populations of Arabidopsis that are involved in regulating how plants acquire and accumulate Na⁺ from the soil. Elemental profiling of shoot tissue from 12 different Arabidopsis accessions revealed that two coastal populations of Arabidopsis collected from Tossa del Mar, Spain, and Tsu, Japan (Ts-1 and Tsu-1, respectively), accumulate higher shoot levels of Na⁺ than do Col-0 and other accessions. We identify AtHKT1, known to encode a Na⁺ transporter, as being the causal locus driving elevated shoot Na⁺ in both Ts-1 and Tsu-1. Furthermore, we establish that a deletion in a tandem repeat sequence approximately 5 kb upstream of AtHKT1 is responsible for the reduced root expression of AtHKT1 observed in these accessions. Reciprocal grafting experiments establish that this loss of AtHKT1 expression in roots is responsible for elevated shoot Na⁺. Interestingly, and in contrast to the hkt1–1 null mutant, under NaCl stress conditions, this novel AtHKT1 allele not only does not confer NaCl sensitivity but also cosegregates with elevated NaCl tolerance. We also present all our elemental profiling data in a new open access ionomics database, the Purdue Ionomics Information Management System (PiiMS; http://www.purdue.edu/dp/ionomics). Using DNA microarray-based genotyping has allowed us to rapidly identify AtHKT1 as the casual locus driving the natural variation in shoot Na⁺ accumulation we observed in Ts-1 and Tsu-1. Such an approach overcomes the limitations imposed by a lack of established genetic markers in most Arabidopsis accessions and opens up a vast and tractable source of natural variation for the identification of gene function not only in ionomics but also in many other biological processes. Unlike most animals, plants are sessile and cannot leave a poor-quality environment after germinating. They therefore need to tolerate the particular conditions they encounter to survive. This makes plants an ideal system for the study of adaptive variation, and this is particularly true of Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis), which shows substantial natural variation and for which numerous genetic tools exist. Using a combination of analytical chemistry, genetics, and genomics, the authors were able to identify the specific genetic alteration that drive the natural variation in shoot sodium (Na⁺) accumulation capacity observed in Arabidopsis populations from coastal regions of Spain and Japan (Tossa del Mar and Tsu, respectively). They observed that a deletion in the DNA responsible for regulating the expression of HKT1, a gene known to encode for a Na⁺ transporter, causes reduced expression of AtHKT1 in roots of both the Spanish and Japanese populations. Such altered expression results in the elevated shoot Na⁺ observed in these two populations. Interestingly, this novel version of the HKT1 genes is also associated genetically with the enhanced NaCl resistance they observe in the Japanese population.