Abstract
Cysteine protease activity comprises the majority of proteolytic activities in plants. They are involved in almost every facet of the plant’s development. Accumulating evidence indicates multiple roles of this protease type in response to biotic and abiotic stress. To understand the regulations and functions of cysteine protease in rice, its evolutionary and structural evidence was uncovered in this study. Using MEROPS, a peptidase database, the 74 rice cysteine proteases belonging to six families were queried. Each of these families represents distinct proteolytic enzyme; C1 is a papain-like protease, C2 is a calpain-2-type, C12 is an ubiquitinyl hydrolase-L1 enzyme, C13 is legumain, C14 is a caspase-1 type, and C15 is a pyroglutamyl peptidase 1 enzyme type. Evolutionary expansion attributed to gene duplication and diversification was particularly evident in C1 family which showed the highest number (n = 53) of members, most of which contained the highest number and most variable introns and motifs, whereas families C13, C14, and C15 had only a few members which all contained lesser number and variation of intron and motif. Out of 74 total cysteine protease gene members, 73 were globular proteins and 55 were predicted as stable proteins. Spatial expression assay of selected C1 members showed that LOC_Os01g73980 and LOC_Os05g01810 were highly expressed in the stem and leaves, while LOC_Os02g27030 was constitutively expressed in all tissues. The expression of LOC_Os01g73980 and LOC_Os05g01810 was also highly activated by salinity stress, while LOC_Os02g27030 was activated by both salinity and heat. LOC_Os05g01810 overexpression transgenic rice exhibited moderate tolerance to salinity stress, which provides interesting clues on biological functions of these genes in rice.
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Acknowledgements
This research was supported by the Next-Generation BioGreen 21 Program (The Agricultural Genome Center, No. PJ01330201), Rural Development Administration, and by the Korea Institute of Planning and Evaluation for Technology in Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries (IPET) through Golden Seed Project funded by the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Rural Affairs (MAFRA) (213009-05-3-WT211), Republic of Korea.
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Niño, M.C., Kim, MS., Kang, K.K. et al. Genome-wide identification and molecular characterization of cysteine protease genes in rice. Plant Biotechnol Rep 14, 69–87 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11816-019-00583-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11816-019-00583-8