Genome-wide systematic characterization and its regulatory expression reprogramming process of the bZIP transcription factors during trauma response in Camellia sinensis

Abstract

Basic leucine zipper (bZIP) transcription factor (TF) genes regulate numerous biological processes, as well as biotic and abiotic responses. Although the genome of the tea tree (Camellia sinensis (L.) Kuntze) has been released, knowledge regarding the bZIP TF family in C. sinensis, e.g., phylogenetic relationship and transcriptional gene expression profiles, remains limited. In this study, we characterized 77 bZIP genes in C. sinensis based on transcriptomic and genomic data and divided them into 11 groups according to their phylogenetic relationship with those in Arabidopsis, which allowed us to identify 14 pairs of orthologous proteins shared by Arabidopsis and C. sinensis and 19 pairs of paralogous proteins in C. sinensis. Conserved motif analysis of CsbZIP proteins showed high group specificity. Our classification was supported by the predicted specificities based on DNA-binding domains, as well as the dimerization property based on characteristic features in the basic and hinge regions and the leucine zipper. Specifically, they indicated that some highly conserved amino acid residues exist across each major group in the tree of land plant life. Expression profiling analyses indicate that the CsbZIP genes are likely involved in response to trauma, and a model was established to display the unique expression of each group during different time intervals after wounding. This work provides useful clues for further functional characterization of the CsbZIP TFs.

S1-bZIP Transcription Factors Play Important Roles in the Regulation of Fruit Quality and Stress Response

“…Another study demonstrates that low temperature stress induces mlipl5 expression, and the protein subsequently binds to the promoter region of Adh1 (Kusano et al, 1995). Interestingly, mechanical damage in tea leaves leads to the activation of S1-bZIPs such as CsbZIP2, −11, −14, −16, −20, −21, −28 and −30 (Xue et al, 2018). Overall, it appears that the expression levels of these S1-bZIPs respond to stress signals in a tissue-specific manner.…”

“…There are about four times more bZIP genes in the Arabidopsis genome than in the genomes of other model organisms such as Saccharomyces cerevisiae, Caenorhabditis elegans, and Drosophila melanogaster (Riechmann et al, 2000). Large numbers of bZIP TF family members have been found in many plant species including rice (Nijhawan et al, 2008), maize (Wei et al, 2012), tomato (Li D. et al, 2015), common wheat (Li X. et al, 2015), sorghum (Wang et al, 2011), soybean (Liao et al, 2008), banana (Hu et al, 2016a), cassava (Hu et al, 2016b), grape (Liu J. et al, 2014), peach (Wang et al, 2015), strawberry (Wang et al, 2015;Zhang et al, 2022), apple (Wang et al, 2015;Li et al, 2016), rapeseed (Zhou et al, 2017), radish (Fan et al, 2019), cucumber (Baloglu et al, 2014), tea plant (Xue et al, 2018), sweet potato , watermelon/melon (Unel et al, 2019), Chinese jujube (Zhang et al, 2020a), pepper (Gai et al, 2020), Chinese pear (Manzoor et al, 2021), poplar (Zhao et al, 2021), quinoa (Li et al, 2020) and plum (Li et al, 2021).…”

Genome-Wide Analysis of C/S1-bZIP Subfamilies in Populus tomentosa and Unraveling the Role of PtobZIP55/21 in Response to Low Energy

“…This diversity in dimer formation confers functional versatility to bZIP proteins. To date, the bZIP family members have been extensively identified in many plant species including Arabidopsis thaliana [2], Zea mays [4], Oryza sativa [5], Solanum lycopersicum [6], Solanum tuberosum [7], Camellia sinensis [8], Vitis vinifera [9], and Malus domestica [10].…”