Monitoring expression profiles of Arabidopsis gene expression during rehydration process after dehydration using ca 7000 full-length cDNA microarray.

Plants respond and adapt to drought stress in order to survive under stress conditions. Several genes that respond to drought at the transcriptional level have been described, but there are few reports on genes involved in the recovery from dehydration. Analysis of rehydration-inducible genes should help not only to understand the molecular mechanisms of stress responses in higher plants, but also to improve the stress tolerance of crops by gene manipulation. We used a full-length cDNA microarray containing ca. 7000 Arabidopsis full-length cDNAs and identified 152 rehydration-inducible genes. Venn diagram analysis showed relationship of the rehydration-inducible genes to proline-inducible and water-treatment-inducible genes. Among the 152 rehydration-inducible genes, 58 genes contained the ACTCAT sequence involved in proline- and hypoosmolarity-inducible gene expression in their promoter regions, suggesting that ACTCAT sequence is a major cis-acting element involved in rehydration-inducible gene expression, and that some novel cis-acting elements are involved in rehydration-inducible gene expression. Functional analysis of rehydration-inducible and rehydration-repressed genes revealed their functions not only in the release from a stressed status but also in the recovery of growth in plants.