Genome-wide Identification and Characterization of Cytokinin Metabolic Gene Families in Chickpea (Cicer arietinum)

Abstract

In today's globe, when the population is growing every day, chickpeas are a crucial crop from an economic and nutritional standpoint. The regulation of cytokinin concentrations by the alteration of cytokinin metabolic genes offers a potential strategy for enhancing agricultural yield. These cytokinin metabolic genes are CKX, IPT, GLU, and ZOG. The IPT gene family produces cytokinins, CKX causes their degradation, and the zeatin O-glucosyltransferases (ZOG) gene family play roles in the reversible inactivation and β-glucosidases (GLU) is responsible for reactivation of cytokinins. These genes control the production of cytokinins in a controlled amount. Identification and characterization of the genes in these families is a crucial step in improving our comprehension of CK metabolism in chickpea. The sequences of every member of the chickpea cytokinin metabolic gene family were found and obtained for genome-wide analysis from the pulse database. These findings allowed for the identification of 7 CaIPT genes, 130 CaZOG genes, 32 CaGLU genes and 7 CaCKX genes in chickpea. The genes in each of these families all contain respective conserved domains. Since the soybean and Arabidopsis families of plants are dicots, just like the chickpea, all of the genes were renamed based on their actual orthologues. Using CDS and genome sequencing, the structural properties were made clear. These genes' promoter study revealed abundantly responsive elements for auxin, defense and stress, salicylic acid, abscisic acid, anaerobic induction, light adaptation, MeJA-R, and modulation of zein metabolism. All of the genes' expression profiles revealed that seeds consistently exhibited higher levels of expression at all phases of the plant's life cycle. The location of the cytokinin metabolic genes and the phenomena of gene duplication were revealed by localization and circos plot analysis respectively. Synteny studies showed that some cytokinin metabolic genes followed an evolutionary pathway that was mostly maintained across chickpea and the other three related species. Using a strings database, it was possible to predict how the proteins involved in cytokinin metabolism would interact with other proteins.