Abstract
Superoxide dismutase proteins (SODs) are antioxidant enzymes with important roles in abiotic stress responses. The SOD gene family has been systematically analyzed in many plants; however, it is still poorly understood in maize. Here, a bioinformatics analysis of maize SOD gene family was conducted by describing gene structure, conserved motifs, phylogenetic relationships, gene duplications, promoter cis-elements and GO annotations. In total, 13 SOD genes were identified in maize and five members were involved in segmental duplication. Phylogenetic analysis indicated that SODs from maize and other plants comprised two groups, which could be further classified into different subgroups, with most members in the same subgroup having the same subcellular localization. The ZmSOD promoters contained 2-10 stress-responsive cis-elements with different distributions. Heatmap analysis indicated that ZmSODs were expressed in most of the detected tissues and organs. The expression patterns of ZmSODs were investigated under drought and salt treatments by qRT-PCR, and most members were responsive to drought or salt stress, especially some ZmSODs with significant expression changes were identified, such as ZmCSD2 and ZmMSD2, suggesting the important roles of ZmSODs in abiotic stress responses. Our results provide an important basis for further functional study of ZmSODs in future study.
Highlights
Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are inevitable products in the process of cellular metabolism that act as signal molecules to regulate many physiological processes in plants (Gechev et al, 2006)
According to the physico-chemical characteristics predicted by the Expasy tool, we found that the protein lengths, molecular weights (MWs), and isoelectric points of the ZmSOD members had large ranges
Our study indicated that five ZmSODs were involved in the segmental duplication, which suggests that segmental duplication plays an important role in the expansion of maize superoxide dismutase (SOD) gene family
Summary
Reactive oxygen species (ROS) are inevitable products in the process of cellular metabolism that act as signal molecules to regulate many physiological processes in plants (Gechev et al, 2006). Abiotic stresses, such as drought, salt and extreme temperature, often induce the production and accumulation of ROS in plant cells (Karuppanapandian et al, 2011), and the presence of excess ROS negatively affects cell growth and even leads to cell death (Mittler, 2002; Lee et al, 2007).
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