Water defcit and dehydration is one of the most important environmental stress factors that greatly infuences plant growth and development and seriously reduces crop yield (Pandey et al. 2008; Ceccarelli 2010; Farooq et al. 2017) and it is the bottleneck of agricultural development in many regions. However, very few plants have subjected to biochemical and molecular studies to analyze the mechanisms of dehydration stress tolerance. They showed that the intrinsic ability of plants to tolerate various environmental stresses was a result of diferent biochemical and molecular mechanisms. What is more, elucidation of the nature of these mechanisms would be an interesting area of research. Many studies on the resistances of plants under water stress showed that plants can produce a series of changes in morphological, physiological, biochemical and molecular aspects and showed drought-resistant ability (Alam et al. 2010; Manaa et al. 2011; Chen et al. 2011; Gupta et al. 2014). Nowadays, with the rapid development of modern molecular biology, the mechanism of drought resistance in plants not only had great infuence on it in terms of morphology and physiology but also genetic engineering had increased understanding (Zhu 2002; Chaves et al. 2009; Cramer et al. 2011). Since proteins are directly involved in the plant stress response, the response proteins induced by drought have already became a hot spot in fghting drought and gene expression adaptation to adverse arid circumstances (Watson et al. 2003; Zhang et al. 2006; Farooq et al. 2009; Azooz 2010; Kosová et al. 2011; Xu and Wu 2016). Legumes are valuable agricultural, commercial and cold-tolerant crops that serve as important nitrogen sources for human diet, animal feed and farmland (Broughton et al. 2003; Boschin and Arnoldi 2011). Particularly, changing in proteomic expression during drought stress had been observed in legume crops showing diferential regulation of mechanisms, such as chick pea (Turner et al. 2005; Subba et al. 2013; Jaiswal et al. 2014), soy bean (Tran and Mochida 2010; Das et al. 2016) and mung bean (Sengupta et al. 2011). They showed that the intrinsic ability of model legume plants to tolerate various environmental stresses was a result of diferent biochemical and molecular mechanisms. Faba bean (Vicia faba L.) is one of the most important legume species for human consumption due to its highnutritional value, high protein content and beneficial healthy properties (Amede et al. 1999; Abdelmula et al. 1999). Qinghai is located in northwest China and on the northeastern part of the Qinghai–Tibet Plateau with an average altitude above 3000 m. Faba bean could adapt to the cold climate and varied land conditions. Faba bean can product rhizobia nitrogen symbionts for itself and succession crop as nitrogen sources and it could change soil structure. In Qinghai, 80% of the faba bean is distributed in the irrigated agriculture region which accounts for only 30% of the total cultivated land biome; however, 70% of the total cultivated land is a rain-fed land (dry areas or semi-arid areas) where the planting area of faba bean accounts only for 20%. Faba bean uses more water and more sensitive to drought than some other grain legumes such as common bean, pea and chickpea (Mittler and Zilinskas 1994; Martínez et al. 2007; Awasthi et al. 2014). Drought stress can lead to serious yield decrease of faba bean in arid area and afects the efcient and sustainable development of agriculture in Qinghai.