Abstract
BackgroundGinseng is an important medicinal herb in Asia and Northern America. The basic leucine zipper (bZIP) transcription factor genes play important roles in many biological processes and plant responses to abiotic and biotic stresses, such as drought stress. Nevertheless, the genes remain unknown in ginseng.ResultsHere, we report 91 bZIP genes identified from ginseng, designated PgbZIP genes. These PgbZIP genes were alternatively spliced into 273 transcripts. Phylogenetic analysis grouped the PgbZIP genes into ten groups, including A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I and S. Gene Ontology (GO) categorized the PgbZIP genes into five functional subcategories, suggesting that they have diversified in functionality, even though their putative proteins share a number of conserved motifs. These 273 PgbZIP transcripts expressed differentially across 14 tissues, the roots of different ages and the roots of different genotypes. However, the transcripts of the genes expressed coordinately and were more likely to form a co-expression network. Furthermore, we studied the responses of the PgbZIP genes to drought stress in ginseng using a random selection of five PgbZIP genes, including PgbZIP25, PgbZIP38, PgbZIP39, PgbZIP53 and PgbZIP54. The results showed that all five PgbZIP genes responded to drought stress in ginseng, indicating that the PgbZIP genes play important roles in ginseng responses to drought stress.ConclusionsThese results provide knowledge and gene resources for deeper functional analysis of the PgbZIP genes and molecular tools for enhanced drought tolerance breeding in ginseng.
Highlights
Ginseng is an important medicinal herb in Asia and Northern America
As the conserved domains of 1,684 of the 1,957 transcripts were incomplete or out of open reading frame (ORF), the remaining 273 transcripts that contain complete basic leucine zipper (bZIP) domains in their ORFs were identified as the Panax ginseng bZIP (PgbZIP) gene transcripts for Jilin ginseng
45 (49 %) of the 91 Jilin ginseng PgbZIP genes identified in this study were orthologous to 111 (76 %) of the 146 Korean ginseng PgbZIP genes
Summary
Ginseng is an important medicinal herb in Asia and Northern America. The basic leucine zipper (bZIP) transcription factor genes play important roles in many biological processes and plant responses to abiotic and biotic stresses, such as drought stress. Ginseng (Panax ginseng C.A. Meyer) is an important medicinal herb in Asia and Northern America. Transcription factors (TFs) have been shown to play a vital role in plant responses to various biotic or abiotic stresses. The basic leucine zipper (bZIP) transcription factor containing a conserved bZIP domain that is composed of 60–80 amino acids is known as one of the largest TF families [6, 7]. The conserved bZIP domain is composed of two important functional regions: the basic region and the leucine zipper region, linked by one hinge [8, 9]. The leucine zipper region mediates the homo- and/ or hetero-dimerization as it contains a less conserved dimerization motif [10,11,12,13]
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