Abstract
The members of the Abscisic Acid (ABA) Stress and Ripening gene family (ASR) encode a class of plant-specific proteins with ABA/WDS domains that play important roles in fruit ripening, abiotic stress tolerance and biotic stress resistance in plants. The ASR gene family has been widely investigated in the monocotyledons and dicotyledons. Although the genome sequence is already available for eight fruit species of the Rosaceae, there is far less information about the evolutionary characteristics and the function of the ASR genes in the Rosaceae than in other plant families. Twenty-seven ASR genes were identified from species in the Rosaceae and divided into four subfamilies (I, II, III, and IV) on the basis of structural characteristics and phylogenetic analysis. Purifying selection was the primary force for ASR family gene evolution in eight Rosaceae species. qPCR experiments showed that the expression pattern of PbrASR genes from Pyrus bretschneideri was organ-specific, being mainly expressed in flower, fruit, leaf, and root. During fruit development, the mRNA abundance levels of different PbrASR genes were either down- or up-regulated, and were also induced by exogenous ABA. Furthermore, subcellular localization results showed that PbrASR proteins were mainly located in the nucleus and cytoplasm. These results provide a theoretical foundation for investigation of the evolution, expression, and functions of the ASR gene family in commercial fruit species of the Rosaceae family.
Highlights
The adaptation of plants to various stressful environmental conditions are associated with changes in morphological traits, physiological and biochemical pathways, and expression of related genes to mitigate the damage caused by such biological and abiotic stresses
These results indicated that the expansion of ASR genes in the Rosaceae was not caused by the ancient whole-genome duplication (WGD) event, but may have been caused by the recent WGD event in apple and Chinese white pear
The results showed that the three PbrASR genes were distributed on two of the 17 Chinese white pear chromosomes, with one ASR gene located on Chr5 and two ASR genes located on Chr10, with three syntenic pairs detected between intra- and intergenomic blocks; the three ASR genes were distributed on two of the 17 chromosomes in European pear, with two genes located on Chr10, and two syntenic pairs were identified among intra- and intergenomic blocks
Summary
The adaptation of plants to various stressful environmental conditions are associated with changes in morphological traits, physiological and biochemical pathways, and expression of related genes to mitigate the damage caused by such biological and abiotic stresses. The ABA, Stress, and Ripening (ASR) genes encode a small, plant-specific, hydrophilic protein, which is involved in the response of plants to drought, high salt, low temperature, and abscisic acid stresses, and in many plant metabolic processes, such as fruit development, maturation, and sugar metabolism (Iusem et al, 1993; Cakir et al, 2003; Saumonneau et al, 2012; Jia et al, 2016; Li et al, 2020). The number of genes in the ASR gene family are one in grape (Cakir et al, 2003), four in banana (Liu et al, 2010), six in rice (Gonzalez and Iusem, 2014), and ten in maize (Jeanneau et al, 2002). No ASR gene family members have been reported in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana
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