AUTHOR=Darwish Hadeer , Al-Osaimi Ghaida S. , Al Kashgry Najla Amin T. , Sonbol Hana , Alayafi Aisha A. M. , Alabdallah Nadiyah M. , Al-Humaid Abdulrahman , Al-Harbi Nadi Awad , Al-Qahtani Salem Mesfir , Abbas Zahid Khorshid , Darwish Doaa Bahaa Eldin , Ibrahim Mohamed F. M. , Noureldeen Ahmed 

TITLE=Evaluating the genotoxicity of salinity stress and secondary products gene manipulation in lime, Citrus aurantifolia, plants

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Plant Science

VOLUME=Volume 14 - 2023

YEAR=2023

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/plant-science/articles/10.3389/fpls.2023.1211595

DOI=10.3389/fpls.2023.1211595

ISSN=1664-462X

ABSTRACT=Salinity is a significant abiotic stress that has a profound effect on growth, the content of secondary products, and the genotoxicity of cells. Lime, Citrus aurantifolia is a popular plant belongs to family Rutaceae. The interest in cultivating this plant is due to the importance of its volatile oil, which is included in many pharmaceutical industries but C. aurantifolia plants are affected by the NaCl salinity levels. In the present study comet assay test has been applied to evaluate the genotoxic impact of salinity at 0, 50, 100, and 200 mM NaCl on C. aurantifolia tissue cultured plants. Furthermore, the terpene gene expression was investigated using semi-quantitative real time polymerase chain reaction. Results from the two analyses revealed that 200 mM NaCl stress resulted in high levels of severe damage to the C. aurantifolia plants' DNA tail 21.8 %, tail length 6.56 µm, and tail moment 3.19 Unit. The relative highest expression of RtHK and TAT genes were 2.08, and 1.693, respectively when plants exposed to 200 mM NaCl, whereas, pv4CL2RT expressed 1.50 in plants subjected to 100 mM NaCl. The accumulation of transcripts for the RTMYB was 0.951 when plants treated with NaCl at 50 mM, and RtGPPS gene was significantly decreased to 0.446 during saline exposure 100 mM. We conclude that comet assay test offer an appropriate tool to detect DNA damage as well as RtHK, TAT, and pv4CL2RT genes have post-transcriptional regulation in C. aurantifolia plant cells under salinity stress. Future studies are needed to assess application of gene expression and comet assay technologies using another set of genes that show vulnerability to different stresses on lime and other plants.