• Korean Journal of Plant Tissue Culture
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• v.27 no.1
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• pp.13-18
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• 2000

To investigate the function of chloroplast small HSP, transgenic tobacco plants (Nicotiana tabacum L. cv. Samsun) that constitutively overexpress the chloroplast small HSP (NtHSP21) from N. tabacum cv. Petit Havana SR1 were generated. Five homozygous lines of transformants showing different constitutive expression levels of the NtHSP21 were selected. To determine whether constitutive overexpression of NtHSP21 protein affects thermotolerance, wild-type and transformants were grown in Petri dishes, heat-stressed at 52$^{\circ}C$ for 45 min, and then incubated in normal growth condition. When heat-stressed wild-type plantlets were incubated at $25^{\circ}C$, leaf color gradually became white and all trio plantlets finally died within a week. As for the transformants, however, more than 70% of them remained green and survived under the conditions in which all the wild-type plants were dying. It was also found that the levels of NtHSP21 were correlated with the degree of thermotolerance. These results suggest that the NtHSP21 protein in transformants is responsible for the increase in thermotolerance.