Abstract
Genes encoding inositolphosphorylceramide synthase (IPCS), which play essential roles in sphingolipid biosynthesis, have been known to be widely distributed in plants. However, reports on identification, expression, and function analysis of plant IPCS family genes are very limited. In this study, a total of three OsIPCS genes were identified in the rice database, and their full-length coding regions were amplified by RT-PCR. These genes had 12–13 exons, and they encoded proteins of 313–326 amino acids with molecular mass of 35.8–37.6 kDa and isoelectric point of 10.99–12.61. Importantly, two typical and conserved motifs (D3 and D4) in plants were found in all the three putative OsIPCS proteins, indicating high similarity of OsIPCSs to the other plant IPCS proteins, which were confirmed by phylogenetic analysis. The transcripts of OsIPCS genes appeared in different rice organs including seedling roots, stems and leaves, and young panicles, but each gene showed a unique organ-specific expression pattern. Meanwhile, we found that all the three OsIPCS genes showed responses to stresses like drought, cold and salt, but their expression patterns were also to some extent different under stress treatments. Especially, under cold stress, OsIPCS1 and OsIPCS2 were significantly up-regulated in roots and stems but down-regulated in leaves, while OsIPCS3 was significantly up-regulated in all the measured organs. Actually, putative abiotic-stress regulatory elements were identified in the promoters of these genes. Our data suggest that OsIPCS genes should play important roles during rice growth and adversity adaptation.
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Acknowledgements
This work was mainly supported by grants from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Nos. 31560383, 31560298, 31460279 and 31260313).
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XP and SL designed research; JH, PT and WN performed research; PL and XP analyzed data; HP and YF did bioinformatic analysis and revised the manuscript; PL and SL wrote the paper.
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Pengfei Liao, Jinqiu Huang, Puguo Tong, Wang Nie, Xin Yan, Yingmei Feng, Hui Peng, Xiaojue Peng, and Shaobo Li declare that they have no conflict of interest.
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This article does not contain any studies with human subjects or animals performed by any of the authors.
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Pengfei Liao and Jinqiu Huang have contributed equally to this work.
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Liao, P., Huang, J., Tong, P. et al. Characterization and expression analysis of inositolphosphorylceramide synthase family genes in rice (Oryza sativa L.). Genes Genom 39, 485–492 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13258-016-0489-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13258-016-0489-0