Xiaoru Ran , Jun Hong , Fazhe Yan , Jianxin Shi

Joint International Research Laboratory of Metabolic & Developmental Sciences, School of Life Sciences and Biotechnology, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, 200240, China
Author    Correspondence author
Plant Gene and Trait, 2023, Vol. 14, No. 3   doi: 10.5376/pgt.2023.14.0003
Received: 23 Feb., 2023    Accepted: 02 Mar., 2023    Published: 09 Mar., 2023

This article was first published in Molecular Plant Breeding in Chinese, and here was authorized to translate and publish the paper in English under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Ran X.R., Hong J., Yan F.Z., and Shi J.X., 2023, Identification and bioinformatics analysis on phosphatidylcholine diglyceride choline phosphotransferase family genes in plants, Plant Gene and Trait, 14(3): 1-10 (doi: 10.5376/pgt.2023.14.0003)

Phosphatidylcholine diglyceride choline phosphotransferase (PDCT) is involved in the synthesis of seed triglyceride (TAG) in plant, catalyzing the transfer between phosphatidylcholine (PC) and diacylglycerol (DAG), and the loss of the PDCT activity reduces significantly the accumulation of seed polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFAs). In this study, taking advantage of public available genomes of six oil crops (peanut, rape, soybean, cotton, sesame and sunflower), two staple food crops (rice and maize) and one aquatic plant (Chinese lotus), we identified in total 20 PDCT orthologues using bioinformatics, and further investigated into physical and protein chemical property, chromosome distribution, phylogenetic evolution, gene structure and promoter sequence. Our results showed that the PDCT family members have conserved domains and gene structures, as well as stable protein properties and structures, implying certain evolutionary conservation among them. In addition, copy numbers of PDCT were significantly different in tested plant species, while crop plants and Arabidopsis had one single copy, oil crops almost have at least 2 copies. Furthermore, the existence of many transcription core promoter elements and photo-response cis-acting elements in the promoter regions of these identified PDCT genes indicated that the expression of PDCT genes is likely affected by multiple developmental and environmental stress signals. In sum, this study provided a bioinformatics reference for further study on the potential application of PDCT family genes in crop breeding.

PDCT; Protein structure; Evolutionary analysis; Promoter analysis