Identification and Bioinformatic Analysis of CAMTA Genes in Olive (Olea europaea L.)

Abstract

Calcium is a secondary messenger which involves in stress response, adaptation, development and signaling pathways in plants. In cells, calcium is captured by calmodulin and after a conformation change, calmodulin becomes able to target calmodulin binding transcription factors. The calmodulin-binding transcriptional activators (CAMTAs) are one of these calmodulin binding transcription factors and they have CG-1, TIG, ANK, CaMBD and IQ conserved domains. CAMTAs are studied well in lots of plant species, and they are found to be involved in stress responses like drought, cold, salt and hormone responses like ethylene, abscisic acid, auxin, and gibberellin. In this study, CAMTA genes and proteins are characterized in olive. Olive (Olea europaea L.) is a Mediterranean commercially important crop, and this is the first study on olive CAMTAs. 7 CAMTA genes are found in olive in total in this study. Then, the cis-actin regulatory elements in the promoter regions of these genes are analyzed. Stress and hormone response related elements in the promoter regions are found, suggesting possible stress and hormone response roles of CAMTAs in olive. Also, protein characteristics, conserved domains, and subcellular localizations are investigated. According to the results, all olive CAMTA proteins are mainly localized in the nucleus as consistent with their roles, and all of them have 2 to 6 conserved domains which are also found in other plant CAMTAs. Additionally, a phylogenetic tree with 109 CAMTA proteins from well-knows plant species is constructed, and this tree showed that olive CAMTA proteins are highly conserved in plant kingdom.