GENOME-WIDE IDENTIFICATION AND EXPRESSION ANALYSIS OF STRESS-RESPONSIVE GENES IN CROP SPECIES

Abstract

Droughts, salinity and heat are among the significant abiotic stressors that limit crop productivity and food security across the world and thus require a more in-depth appreciation of plant stress tolerance processes at the molecular scale. This report shows a detailed identification and expression of genes that are involved in petal stress response at the genome-wide scale in crop species using combined bioinformatics and transcriptomics techniques. Genomic and RNA-seq datasets that are publicly available were analysed systematically to name candidate genes involved with stress response. Twenty two distinct types of stress-responsive genes were found and grouped into different families according to the domains of the conserved domain and the sequence homology. Phylogeny helped to determine the evolutionary relationship and functional conservatism in the clusters of genes. Expression profiling showed a strong difference regulation of major genes under stress situation and there were a number of genes which were found to be more than twofoldly upregulated (p < 0.05). The analysis of functional enrichment showed that the main function of these genes is signal transduction, osmotic regulation, and reactive oxygen species detoxification pathways. Moreover, to confirm the expression of the candidate genes during stress, quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) was employed to validate the pattern of its stress-induced expression of the candidate genes. The integrative analysis offers new understandings to the genetic fabric of genetic resilience to stress and there are some possible molecular targets to enhance crop resilience via breeding and biotechnological intervention.