Dynamic and non-additive gene regulation shapes maize responses to simultaneous salt and cold stress

Abstract

Salt and cold stresses often occur together in nature and severely impact crop productivity, yet their transcriptional regulation remains poorly understood. Here, we conducted a time-series transcriptomic analysis of maize under salt, cold, and their combination at 0, 6, 12, and 24 h. Differential expression analysis revealed dynamic, condition-specific gene responses grouped into eight distinct temporal patterns. Promoter motif analysis of genes within each pattern identified 5–39 significantly enriched motifs, with over 40% lacking known counterparts, suggesting the involvement of previously uncharacterized cis-regulatory elements in stress-responsive transcriptional regulation. By comparing combined stress responses to the sum of single-stress effects, we found that about 74% of DEGs showed non-additive patterns, suggesting that combined stress triggers a distinct transcriptional program. Evolutionary analysis showed that additive DEGs tend to be more recently evolved, subject to weaker purifying selection, and enriched in transposed duplications, contrasting with the stronger constraint observed in non-additive DEGs. WGCNA identified 24 co-expression modules, among which 65 hub DEGs were detected in modules significantly correlated with specific stress conditions. Furthermore, we reconstructed 228, 20, and 200 sequential transcription factor cascades spanning 6 h, 12 h, and 24 h under cold, salt, and combined stress, respectively, with no cascade shared across all three conditions. Together, these results reveal that maize responses to combined salt and cold stress are largely non-additive and temporally dynamic, with distinct evolutionary patterns underlying different response types, offering insights and candidate regulators for enhancing crop stress resilience.