Abstract
BackgroundGlutathione transferases (GSTs), the ancient, ubiquitous and multi-functional proteins, play significant roles in development, metabolism as well as abiotic and biotic stress responses in plants. Wheat is one of the most important crops, but the functions of GST genes in wheat were less studied.ResultsA total of 330 TaGST genes were identified from the wheat genome and named according to the nomenclature of rice and Arabidopsis GST genes. They were classified into eight classes based on the phylogenetic relationship among wheat, rice, and Arabidopsis, and their gene structure and conserved motif were similar in the same phylogenetic class. The 43 and 171 gene pairs were identified as tandem and segmental duplication genes respectively, and the Ka/Ks ratios of tandem and segmental duplication TaGST genes were less than 1 except segmental duplication gene pair TaGSTU24/TaGSTU154. The 59 TaGST genes were identified to have syntenic relationships with 28 OsGST genes. The expression profiling involved in 15 tissues and biotic and abiotic stresses suggested the different expression and response patterns of the TaGST genes. Furthermore, the qRT-PCR data showed that GST could response to abiotic stresses and hormones extensively in wheat.ConclusionsIn this study, a large GST family with 330 members was identified from the wheat genome. Duplication events containing tandem and segmental duplication contributed to the expansion of TaGST family, and duplication genes might undergo extensive purifying selection. The expression profiling and cis-elements in promoter region of 330 TaGST genes implied their roles in growth and development as well as adaption to stressful environments. The qRT-PCR data of 14 TaGST genes revealed that they could respond to different abiotic stresses and hormones, especially salt stress and abscisic acid. In conclusion, this study contributed to the further functional analysis of GST genes family in wheat.
Highlights
Glutathione transferases (GSTs), the ancient, ubiquitous and multi-functional proteins, play significant roles in development, metabolism as well as abiotic and biotic stress responses in plants
Identification of wheat GST proteins and analysis of phylogenetic relationship To identify the GST proteins in wheat, the GST protein sequences of Arabidopsis and rice were used to search against the wheat protein sequences and the potential candidates were reconfirmed by Pfam database and SMART website with the presence of GST_N domain (PF02798) or GST_N_3 domain (PF13417, N-terminal subdomain) [22, 49, 50]
The 200 proteins in tau and 87 in phi classes occupied the majority of the TaGST proteins, just as tau and phi classes were more numerous in most plant GST family [10], and the number distribution of 11 plant species including wheat in eight GST classes were listed in Table 1 [19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28,29]
Summary
Glutathione transferases (GSTs), the ancient, ubiquitous and multi-functional proteins, play significant roles in development, metabolism as well as abiotic and biotic stress responses in plants. Glutathione transferases (GSTs), constituting an ancient, ubiquitous and multi-functional protein superfamily, were first discovered in animals in 1960s that they played crucial roles in drug metabolism and detoxification [1]. The research on the functions of GSTs has extended from the detoxification of herbicides to the secondary metabolism [4], growth and development [5] as well as biotic and abiotic stress responses [6, 7] in plants. The phi and tau classes usually have more members than others in GST family, and the tau, phi, lambda and DHAR classes have long been considered as plant-specific, while the similar sequences of phi class have been discovered in some fungi and bacteria in recent years [10,11,12]
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