Abstract
BackgroundSoybean, a major legume crop native to East Asia, presents a wealth of resources for utilization. The basic leucine zipper (bZIP) transcription factors play important roles in various biological processes including developmental regulation and responses to environmental stress stimuli. Currently, little information is available regarding the bZIP family in the legume crop soybean.ResultsUsing a genome-wide domain analysis, we identified 160 GmbZIP genes in soybean genome, named from GmbZIP1 to GmbZIP160. These 160GmbZIP genes, distributed unevenly across 20 chromosomes, were grouped into 12 subfamilies based on phylogenetic analysis. Gene structure and conserved motif analyses showed that GmbZIP within the same subfamily shared similar intron-exon organizations and motif composition. Syntenic and phylogenetic analyses identified 40 Arabidopsis bZIP genes and 83 soybean bZIP genes as orthologs. By investigating the expression profiling of GmbZIP in different tissues and under drought and flooding stresses, we showed that a majority of GmbZIP (83.44%) exhibited transcript abundance in all examined tissues and 75.6% displayed transcript changes after drought and flooding treatment, suggesting that GmbZIP may play a broad role in soybean development and response to water stress.ConclusionsOne hundred sixty GmbZIP genes were identified in soybean genome. Our results provide insights for the evolutionary history of bZIP family in soybean and shed light on future studies on the function of bZIP genes in response to water stress in soybean.
Highlights
Soybean, a major legume crop native to East Asia, presents a wealth of resources for utilization
OsbZIP23 transcription factor acts as a central regulator in Abscisic acid (ABA) signaling and biosynthesis, and overexpressed OsbZIP23 shows significantly improved drought and salt tolerance, and BiFC assay in rice protoplast indicated that OsbZIP23 could interact with a SnRK2 protein kinase (SAPK2) [9]
Identification of basic leucine zipper (bZIP) gene family in soybean and Arabidopsis The whole bZIP protein sequences from soybean and Arabidopsis were obtained from Phytozome12, downloading the Hidden Markov Models (HMM) profiles of the bZIP domain (PF00170, PF07716, PF03131) as queries to search predicted bZIP proteins in the soybean dataset using HMMER software 3.0 (HMMER: http://hmmer.wustl.edu/) with a threshold of e-value < e− 5 [25]
Summary
A major legume crop native to East Asia, presents a wealth of resources for utilization. Growth and development would be delayed once plants are exposed to terrible environmental conditions, such as drought, cold, high salt, and heat. To survive these stress conditions, plants regulate the expression of stress related genes. The bZIP TFs play key roles in regulation of plants response to various biotic and abiotic stresses, such as glucose-ABA signaling [13], sugar signaling during metabolism [14], ABA signaling for osmotic stress responses during vegetative growth [15], seed germination and flowering time [16], response to zinc deficiency [17], lipid stress responses [18], floral patterning [19], and auxin- mediated histone acetylation [20]
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