In silico study of the CESA and CSL gene family in Arabidopsis thaliana and Oryza sativa: Focus on post-translation modifications

Abstract

Cellulose is an important cell wall component and plays a key role in the environmental stress response. Cellulose synthase (CESA) genes along with cellulose synthase-like (CSL) genes are involved in cellulose biosynthesis and various studies have been carried out on phylogeny and clustering of the related cellulose synthase genes but there is no comparative investigation of factors that regulate the post-translation modification. Here, we have selected candidate genes in Arabidopsis and rice and investigated them by various bioinformatics tools to allow a precise dissection of the regulatory modification elements. According to multiple sequence alignments and the distribution of conserved motifs genes were classified into three major groups and LOC_Os11g13650, LOC_Os02g43440 and LOC_Os10g25740 were identified as members of Os-CSLC subfamily. The prominent differences between CESA and CSL genes were observed in terms of the post-translational modification and physicochemical properties of proteins in Arabidopsis (as dicotyledonous) and rice (as monocotyledonous). Moreover, the binding sites of common transcription factors such as MYB, WRKY and abscisic acid response element (ABRE) family were found in the promoter regions of CESA and CSL genes family, and expression patterns sharply showed differentially expression in Arabidopsis and rice tissues as response to biotic and abiotic stresses. The considerable outcome of the post-translation modification of studied genes demonstrated that CESA proteins were more phosphorylated than CSL proteins, and CESA proteins were more hydrophilic. It can be concluded that obtained results furnish further information about the genes which are involving in cellulose biosynthesis that will be useful for more dissection and functional analysis.