Abstract
Chickpea has a profound nutritional and economic value in vegetarian society. Continuous decline in chickpea productivity is attributed to insufficient genetic variability and different environmental stresses. Chickpea like several other legumes is highly susceptible to terminal drought stress. Multiple genes control drought tolerance and ASR gene plays a key role in regulating different plant stresses. The present study describes the molecular characterization and functional role of Abscissic acid and stress ripening (ASR) gene from chickpea (Cicer arietinum) and the gene sequence identified was submitted to NCBI Genbank (MK937569). Molecular analysis using MUSCLE software proved that the ASR nucleotide sequences in different legumes show variations at various positions though ASR genes are conserved in chickpea with only few variations. Sequence similarity of ASR gene to chickpea putative ABA/WDS induced protein mRNA clearly indicated its potential involvement in drought tolerance. Physiological screening and qRT-PCR results demonstrated increased ASR gene expression under drought stress possibly enabled genotypes to perform better under stress. Conserved domain search, protein structure analysis, prediction and validation, network analysis using Phyre2, Swiss-PDB viewer, ProSA and STRING analysis established the role of hypothetical ASR protein NP_001351739.1 in mediating drought responses. NP_001351739.1 might have enhanced the ASR gene activity as a transcription factor regulating drought stress tolerance in chickpea. This study could be useful in identification of new ASR genes that play a major role in drought tolerance and also develop functional markers for chickpea improvement.
Highlights
Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.), one of the earliest food legume crop with a diploid chromosome number of 16 is cultivated in the tropics all over the world [1] and belongs to the family Fabaceae [2]
Drought stress affected the CI significantly, and the decrease was noteworthy in ICCV2 (20.31%) (Fig 1B)
Present study reveals that increased expression of ASR gene under drought stress possibly enabled the tolerant chickpea genotypes to perform better under stressed conditions
Summary
Chickpea (Cicer arietinum L.), one of the earliest food legume crop with a diploid chromosome number of 16 is cultivated in the tropics all over the world [1] and belongs to the family Fabaceae [2]. The world average productivity is about 995 kg/ ha which is very low [3] and has stagnated in recent years due to vulnerability of chickpea crop to various abiotic (drought, terminal heat, high salt, cold stress), and biotic (Ascochyta blight, Fusarium wilt, Helicoverpa) stresses [6]. Development of chickpea varieties tolerant to drought has been very slow due to its narrow base and limited genomic resources [9] necessitate improving its genetic potential [10]. Plants combat these stresses through a series of physiological mechanisms controlled by several stress related genes which in-turn is regulated by specific transcription factors [11,12,13]
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