Abstract
Plant defensins and lipid transfer proteins (LTPs) constitute a large and evolutionarily diverse family of antimicrobial peptides. Defensins and LTPs are two pathogenesis-related proteins (PR proteins) whose characterization may help to uncover aspects about the sugarcane response to pathogens attack. LTPs have also been investigated for their participation in the response to different types of stress. Despite the important roles of defensins and LTPs in biotic and abiotic stresses, scarce knowledge is found about these proteins in sugarcane. By using bioinformatics approaches, we characterized defensins and LTPs in the sugarcane wild species and modern cultivar genomes. The identification of defensins and LTPs showed that all five defensins groups and eight of the nine LTPs have their respective genes loci, although some was only identified in the cultivar genome. Phylogenetic analysis showed that defensins appear to be more conserved among groups of plants than LTPs. Some defensins and LTPs showed opposite expression during pathogenic and benefic bacterial interactions. Interestingly, the expression of defensins and LTPs in shoots and roots was completely different in plants submitted to benefic bacteria or water depletion. Finally, the modeling and comparison of isoforms of LTPs and defensins in wild species and cultivars revealed a high conservation of tertiary structures, with variation of amino acids in different regions of proteins, which could impact their antimicrobial activity. Our data contributed to the characterization of defensins and LTPs in sugarcane and provided new elements for understanding the involvement of these proteins in sugarcane response to different types of stress.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Prof. Paulo Cavalcanti Gomes Ferreira, Laboratório de Biologia Molecular de Plantas, Instituto de Bioquímica Médica, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro, for providing the sugarcane RNA-seq libraries used for the identification of defensins and LTPs isoforms.
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This work was supported by Fundação de Apoio à Pesquisa no Estado do Rio de Janeiro (FAPERJ) and Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior—Brasil (CAPES)—FinanceCode 001.
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Conceptualization, CG; formal analysis, LOS and CG; writing—original draft preparation, LOS and CG; writing—review and editing, CG; VMG; LOS; LSP; JLP; supervision, CG. All authors contributed to the discussion of the results, reviewed the manuscript, and approved the final manuscript. All authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript.
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de Oliveira Silva, L., da Silva Pereira, L., Pereira, J.L. et al. Divergence and conservation of defensins and lipid transfer proteins (LTPs) from sugarcane wild species and modern cultivar genomes. Funct Integr Genomics 22, 235–250 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10142-022-00832-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10142-022-00832-0