Intrinsic disordered nature and prediction of the secondary structure in wheat dehydrins

Abstract

Dehydrins are well known stress responsive proteins in plants. However, the analysis of dehydrin gene family correlating the intrinsic disordered nature with their secondary structure is lacking in wheat. The wheat genome sequence from IWGSC was used to identify 48 dehydrin genes which encode for 48 dehydrin proteins. The identified dehydrin proteins had molecular weights ranging from 9.65 kDa to 101.60 kDa. The identified proteins were named as TaDHN where Ta indicates Triticum aestivum while DHN indicated dehydrin and this was followed by predicted molecular weight and the chromosome number. PONDR database was used to predict intrinsic disordered nature in these proteins and the results revealed that all the proteins are highly disordered. Among the identified proteins, TaDHN14-6-5A showed maximum disordered nature (88.81%) whereas TaDHN28-1-6D was found to be the least disordered protein (57.25 %). The secondary structure prediction using GOR database revealed the presence of random coils, helix, sheets and turns in all the proteins. Based upon these findings, it can be asserted that this will help in genome wide analysis of dehydrins along with the functional analysis and structure modelling.