ABSTRACT

Plants encounter a variety of environmental stresses, biotic and abiotic, which hinder plant growth and development. Genetic engineering can improve plant performance to reduce or eliminate these effects of environmental stresses by taking a beneficial gene from one species and inserting it into another, especially with recent technological developments in the field of genetics and biochemistry. The purpose of this study was to determine if the overexpression of OsSIZ1, a rice SUMO E3 ligase gene, would enhance abiotic stress tolerance in creeping bentgrass. OsSIZ1 plays an important role in sumoylation, a post-translational regulatory process that can control plant development and responses to abiotic stresses. OsSIZ1 was inserted into the creeping bentgrass genome by Agrobacterium-mediated plant transformation, creating transgenic lines for evaluation. Compared with the wild type controls, transgenic lines of creeping bentgrass were found to show an enhanced resistance to drought conditions, heat shock, and phosphate starvation.