Abstract
Salt stress has the most severe impact on plant growth and development, including seed germination. However, little is known about the mechanism of NR (nitrate reductase)-associated nitric oxide (NO) regulates salt tolerance during seed germination in rice. Herein, we shown that inhibition of seed germination by salt stress was significantly impaired by sodium nitroferricyanide (SNP), a NO donor. Then a triple mutant, nr1/nr2/nr3, was generated. Results shown that germination of triple mutants were delayed and were much more sensitive to salt stress than WT plant, which can be rescued by application of SNP. qPCR analysis revealed that expressions of abscisic acid (ABA) catabolism gene, OsABA8ox1, was suppressed in triple mutants under salt stress, resulting in an elevated ABA content. Similar to SNP, application of nitrate also rescued seed germination under salt stress, which, however, was blocked in the triple mutants. Further study revealed that a nitrate responsive transcript factor, OsNLP2, was induced by salt stress, which thus up-regulates the expression of OsNRs and NR activity, resulting in promoted salt tolerance during seed germination. In addition, nitrate-mediated salt tolerance was impaired in mutant of aba8ox1, a target gene for NLP2. Transient trans-activation assays further revealed NLP2 can significantly activate the expression of OsABA8ox1 and OsNR1, suggesting that NLP2 activates expression of ABA catabolism gene directly or indirectly via NR-associated NO. Taken together, our results demonstrate that NLP2-NR associated NO was involved in salt response by increasing ABA catabolism during seed germination and highlight the importance of NO for stress tolerance of plants.