Fig. 3

Analysis of drought and salinity tolerance at the seedling stage. (a) qRT-PCR analysis of MfbHLH38 in transgenic plants. The different lowercase letters above the bar showed that the expression abundance was significantly different at p < 0.05. (b) Morphology of transgenic and WT seedlings growing for nine days on 1/2 MS medium with varying contents of mannitol and NaCl. The primary root length of corresponding plants were measured and analyzed as showed in (c) and (d). Data are presented as mean and SD values of three independent experiments. Asterisks indicated significant difference (* P < 0.05, ** P < 0.01, by Independent sample T-test) comparing to WT.