Genome‐wide Expansion and Expression Divergence of the Basic Leucine Zipper Transcription Factors in Higher Plants with an Emphasis on Sorghum^F

Abstract

Plant bZIP transcription factors play crucial roles in multiple biological processes. However, little is known about the sorghum bZIP gene family although the sorghum genome has been completely sequenced. In this study, we have carried out a genome-wide identification and characterization of this gene family in sorghum. Our data show that the genome encodes at least 92 bZIP transcription factors. These bZIP genes have been expanded mainly by segmental duplication. Such an expansion mechanism has also been observed in rice, arabidopsis and many other plant organisms, suggesting a common expansion mode of this gene family in plants. Further investigation shows that most of the bZIP members have been present in the most recent common ancestor of sorghum and rice and the major expansion would occur before the sorghum-rice split era. Although these bZIP genes have been duplicated with a long history, they exhibited limited functional divergence as shown by nonsynonymous substitutions (Ka)/synonymous substitutions (Ks) analyses. Their retention was mainly due to the high percentages of expression divergence. Our data also showed that this gene family might play a role in multiple developmental stages and tissues and might be regarded as important regulators of various abiotic stresses and sugar signaling.

Genome-Wide Identification and Analysis of bZIP Family and their Expression in Response to Multiple Abiotic Stresses in Malus domestica

“…The bZIP genes, encoding a big family of transcription factors, are ubiquitous present in eukaryote, from unicellular saccharomycetes [37] to vascular plants. The structure, evolution and function of bZIP genes have been thoroughly studied in Arabidopsis [7], rice [8], maize [31], cucumber [3], soybean [10], sorghum [9] and Brachypodium distachyon [24]. Most of the studies were focused on Gramineae and Cucurbitaceae, while little is known about the bZIP family in Rosaceae.…”

Abiotic Stress in Crops: Candidate Genes, Osmolytes, Polyamines, and Biotechnological Intervention

“…The members of bZIP family vary from plant to plant, about 75 recognized in Arabidopsis , 89 in rice, and 131 in soybean (Kim 2006 ;Liao et al 2008 ;Nijhwan et al 2008 ;Wang et al 2011 ;Wei et al 2012 ). In planta , characterization of various bZIPs indicated that they provide abiotic stress tolerance to plants (Kang et al 2002 ;Kim et al 2004 ;Zou et al 2007 ).…”

Enhancing Abiotic Stress Tolerance in Plants by Modulating Properties of Stress Responsive Transcription Factors

“…TFs often act as dimers or are associated with other proteins to form multi-subunit protein/DNA complexes. The total number of plant TFs identified in the fully sequenced genomes of Arabidopsis, rice, sorghum and maize genomes is about 1,550, 1,600, 2,450 and 3,300, respectively, or 3.5 to 7 % of all identified genes (Wang et al 2011). Overall, the plant TFs are typically classified in up to 60 families, based on their primary sequence, 3D structures, DNAbinding motifs, oligomerisation patterns and post-translational modifications (Wang et al 2011).…”