A genome-wide approach to the comprehensive analysis of GASA gene family in Glycine max

Abstract

A vital role of short amino acid gene family, gibberellic acid stimulated arabidopsis (GASA), has been reported in plant growth and development. Although, little information is available about these cysteine rich short proteins in different plant species and this is the first comprehensive approach to exploit available genomic data and to analyze the GASA family in G. max. The phylogenetic and sequence composition analysis distributed the 37 identified GmGASA genes into three groups. Further investigation of the tissue expression pattern, phylogenetic analysis, motif, gene structure, chromosome distributions, duplication patterns, positive-selection pressure and cis-element analysis of 37 GmGASA genes. A conserved GASA domain was found in all identified GmGASA genes and exhibited similar characteristics. The online gene expression profile based analysis of GmGASA genes reveled that these genes were highly expressed in almost all soybean parts and some have high expression in flower which indicates that GmGASA genes displayed special or distinct expression pattern among different tissues. The segmental duplication was found in five pairs from 37 GmGASA genes and was distributed on 15 different chromosomes. The Ka/Ks ratio of 5 pairs of segmentally duplicated gene indicated that after the occurrence of duplication events, the duplicated gene pairs were purified and selected after restrictive functional differentiation. This investigated study of GmGASA gene will useful to support the statement about GASA genes role during flower induction in flowering plants.