Abstract
APYRASEs, which directly regulate intra- and extra-cellular ATP homeostasis, play a pivotal role in the regulation of various stress adaptations in mammals, bacteria and plants. In the present study, we identified and characterized wheat APYRASE family members at the genomic level in wheat. The results identified a total of nine APY homologs with conserved ACR domains. The sequence alignments, phylogenetic relations and conserved motifs of wheat APYs were bioinformatically analyzed. Although they share highly conserved secondary and tertiary structures, the wheat APYs could be mainly categorized into three groups, according to phylogenetic and structural analysis. Additionally, these APYs exhibited similar expression patterns in the root and shoot, among which TaAPY3-1, TaAPY3-3 and TaAPY3-4 had the highest expression levels. The time-course expression patterns of the eight APYs in response to biotic and abiotic stress in the wheat seedlings were also investigated. TaAPY3-2, TaAPY3-3, TaAPY3-4 and TaAPY6 exhibited strong sensitivity to all kinds of stresses in the leaves. Some APYs showed specific expression responses, such as TaAPY6 to heavy metal stress, and TaAPY7 to heat and salt stress. These results suggest that the stress-inducible APYs could have potential roles in the regulation of environmental stress adaptations. Moreover, the catalytic activity of TaAPY3-1 was further analyzed in the in vitro system. The results showed that TaAPY3-1 protein exhibited high catalytic activity in the degradation of ATP and ADP, but with low activity in degradation of TTP and GTP. It also has an extensive range of temperature adaptability, but preferred relatively acidic pH conditions. In this study, the genome-wide identification and characterization of APYs in wheat were suggested to be useful for further genetic modifications in the generation of high-stress-tolerant wheat cultivars.
Highlights
Wheat is one of the most important crops grown around the world
The protein sequences of the seven Arabidopsis APYs and the conserved Apyrase Conserved Region (ACR) domains were used as the query sequences to BLAST against the recently published wheat genome and transcriptome database (Appels, Eversole & Feuillet, 2018)
The 27 wheat APYs were further divided into nine groups, each group with three homologs located at different genome sets (A, B and D) (Table 1)
Summary
Constant pollution and overfertilization has exposed wheat cultivation to severe heavy metal and salt stresses. Fungal diseases such as Fusarium head blight, rust and powdery mildew have threatened wheat yield improvement. With recent fast developments in genome-editing and gene transformation technologies, it is becoming much easier to generate stress-resistant crop cultivators with these molecular tools. Transcription factors such as MYB (He et al, 2012; Zhang et al, 2012), WRKY (Ning et al, 2017; Niu et al, 2012), No Apical Meristem (NAC) (Xia et al, 2010) and Dehydration Response Element-Binding proteins (DREB) (Pellegrineschi et al, 2004) have been characterized as stress-related gene families. The identification of stress-responsive genes in wheat could help improve stress tolerance by using molecular strategies
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