In silico analysis of drought responsive transposons and transcription factors in Solanum tuberosum L.

Abstract

Potato (Solanum tuberosum L.) is the most important non-grainfood crop and is essential forglobal food security. Drought is one of the major abiotic stress factors resulting in huge yieldloss in the production of crops and similarly, it negativelly affects the tuberization, tuberyield and tuber quality of potato. Transposable elements (TEs) account for a large portion ofthe genome in many eukaryotic species. Several studies have identified the molecularmechanism that cause the activation of TEs under stress. Stresses and environmentalchallenges, in particular, are known to alter the expression or stimulate the transposition ofmobile elements in plants. Transcription of these stress-responsive genes is largelycontrolled by transcription factors (TFs). A number of transcription factors playing anessential role in drought tolerance of plants have been identified in the past few years. Inthis work, a subset of drought responsive TE families and TFs in potato at tuber bulking stagewas defined, based on genome-wide transposon homology and annotation. Our resultsindicated that, the read numbers for TE subfamilies yielded different distributions betweenDNA and RNA transposons. In addition, many TFs such as bHLH, WRKY, NAC, AP2/ERF mayhave important functions in regulation of drought tolerance in potato. Identification of TEsand TFs which are taking part in stress can offer useful information for functional genomicsand designing novel breeding strategies for developing stress tolerant plants.