Exploration of high Temperature stress responsive genes in potato response to tuberisation using yeast functional screening

Abstract

Potato (S. tuberosum) is extremely sensitive to high temperature, a slight increase in optimum temperature may lead to severe decline in the tuber yield. Although, many improvements and progressions were made in the breeding of thermo-tolerant varieties of potato, the mechanism at molecular level which leads to thermo-tolerance is not clear and also not properly understood. The primary phase to understand the thermotolerance progression and processes is to extract and pinpoint the genes of utmost importance that are involved in the same. In this research methodology yeast-based efficient screening and functional elucidation method was used to identify and then further characterize and categorize genes of Kufri surya which is a heat tolerant variety. Two cDNA expression libraries were constructed from thermally stressed potato plants (35 °C) at 0h, 17 days and 45 days of treatment. No probable candidate genes were identified based on this method because of manual and technical errors in the ongoing process and superior capability of yeast cells to over-express the heterologous potato cDNA sequences to tolerate heat stress. However, the experimentation will be continued in order to extract the results