Maibam A¹ , Tyagi A² , Satheesh V¹ , Mahato AK¹ , Jain N¹ , Raje RS² , Rao AR³ , Gaikwad K¹ , Singh NK¹

1. National Research Centre on Plant Biotechnology, New Delhi, India
2. Division of Genetics, Indian Agricultural Research Institute, New Delhi, India
3. Indian Agricultural Statistics Research Institute, New Delhi, India
Author    Correspondence author
Molecular Plant Breeding, 2015, Vol. 6, No. 7   doi: 10.5376/mpb.2015.06.0007
Received: 10 Jan., 2015    Accepted: 28 Feb., 2015    Published: 26 Mar., 2015

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Maibam et al., Genome-wide identification and characterization of heat shock factor genes from pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan), Molecular Plant Breeding, 2015, Vol.6, No. 7 1-11 (doi: 10.5376/mpb.2015.06.0007)

Genome-wide analysis of heat shock factor (Hsf) genes was carried out in pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan) in order to understand their structure and function. A total of 23 Hsfs were predicted using FGENESH and labeled as CcHsf. Out of the 23 genes, 14 unique sequences were selected and characterized for their presumed structures such as protein domain and motif organization. The phylogenetic relationships and expression profiling of CcHsf genes under heat-stress was studied. Phylogenetic analysis showed that CcHsf genes were distributed into eight groups. In this study, classes A, B, and C were further subdivided into subclasses such as A1, A2, A3, A4, A5, A6, A8, A9, B1, B2, B3, B4 and C1. Expression profiling of all 14 genes was carried out by semi-quantitative PCR, among which CcHsfA-1d and CcHsfA-2 were observed to be highly upregulated during heat-stress. Relative quantification with qRT-PCR showed that CcHsfA-1d is upregulated 2-6 hrs after heat-stress indicating its significant role as an early response factor. Our study provides a glimpse of the Hsf gene family in pigeonpea and this information can be utilized to gain more insight into the heat-response mechanism in pigeonpea.

Abbreviations: AHA - Aromatic/ Hydrophobic /Acidic; Hsf - Heat Shock Factors; IRRK- Isoleucine, Arginine, Arginine, Lysine; NLS - Nuclear Localization Signal; NES - Nuclear Export Signal

Domain; Glycine max; Heat shock factor; Motif; Pigeonpea; Phylogenetics