ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Functional and Applied Plant Genomics
This article is part of the Research TopicAI-Assisted Bioinformatics and Functional Genomics Technologies in Medicinal PlantsView all 5 articles
Functional genomic investigation of CYP71AJ49 in Peucedanum praeruptorum Dunn: Agrobacterium-mediated overexpression reveals dual roles in drought adaptation and coumarin biosynthesis
Provisionally accepted
- West Anhui University, Lu'an, China
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Drought stress represents one of the primary constraints on global plant growth and agricultural productivity. The introduction of key stress-tolerant genes through genetic engineering has emerged as a pivotal strategy for enhancing drought resistance in plants, thus prompting extensive investigation into these genes. However, the role and mechanism of key enzymes involved in the coumarin biosynthesis pathway under drought stress remain poorly understood. In this study, we cloned the CYP71AJ49 gene from Peucedanum praeruptorum Dunn and overexpressed it in Arabidopsis thaliana. Under drought stress conditions, transgenic lines exhibited significantly enhanced drought tolerance compared to wild-type plants, along with markedly increased root length, fresh weight, chlorophyll content, and biomass accumulation. CYP71AJ49 overexpression improved drought resistance by activating carbohydrate metabolism pathways, upregulating stress-responsive genes such as AtP5CS2, enhancing antioxidant enzyme activities, and promoting proline accumulation. These changes collectively reduced oxidative damage caused by excessive reactive oxygen species accumulation and mitigated cellular homeostasis disruption. Furthermore, transgenic lines also showed an increase in the accumulation of partial coumarins, which may contribute to improved stress adaptability. Our findings demonstrate that CYP71AJ49 plays a crucial role in the drought stress response and provides a candidate gene from the CYP450 superfamily for improving crop drought resilience.
Keywords: Peucedanum praeruptorum Dunn, CYP71AJ49, Drought stress, Transgenic Arabidopsis, Coumarins, Transcriptome
Received: 17 Sep 2025; Accepted: 01 Dec 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wang, Wang, Chu, Ruan, Dai and Wei. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence:
Jun Dai
Peipei Wei
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