CONSTRUCTION OF A EXPRESSION VECTOR CONTAINING THE GmAP2 GENE FROM SOYBEAN [Glycine max (L.) Merr.]

Abstract

Soybean is a drought and salinity-sensitive crop, so to increase soybean yield, it is necessary to research and develop drought and salinity-tolerant cultivars. One solution of interest is to overexpress key genes involved in synthesising drought/salt tolerance proteins. AP2 is a large protein family of plant-specific transcription factors, and some AP2 genes are inducible to abiotic stress and increase expression under dehydration and high salinity conditions. Therefore, the gene encoding a protein belonging to the AP2 transcription factor family was chosen as the target to determine gene function and propose potential candidate genes in the strategy to improve drought and salinity tolerance of soybeans. This paper reports the results of designing an expression vector carrying the GmAP2 gene structure and expressing them in tobacco plants. The result is an expression vector (pFGC_GmRAP2-4_syn) carrying the soybean GmRAP2-4 gene that was successfully designed. The designed GmRAP2-4_syn gene has a length of 1015 nucleotides encoding 311 amino acids, including the amino acid coding region, the cmyc antigen coding sequence and KDEL. In addition, at both ends of the gene, there is a segment containing the cutting sites of the restriction enzymes AscI and BamHI. The pFGC_GmRAP2-4_syn construct was successfully transformed into tobacco plants and 35 GmRAP2-4_syn transgenic tobacco lines were obtained. Random testing of 3 transgenic tobacco lines gave positive PCR results with specific primer pairs.