Identification of regulatory motifs in putative coding genes of small Heat Shock Proteins in Chenopodium quinoa

SABRINA COSTA TARTARA; ARCE, DÉBORA; CACCHIARELLI, PAOLO; TOLOSA GUSTAVO; PRATTA, GUILLERMO R.

Rosario

Congreso; XIII Argentine Congress of Bioinformatics and Computational Biology (XIII CAB2C); 2023

A2B2C - SOIBIO - RIABIO

Background: Heat Shock Elements (HSE) are conserved motif sequences of DNA (GAA..TTC) present ingene regulatory regions of Heat Shock Proteins (HSPs). HSE interact with Heat Shock transcription Factors(Hsfs) to trigger HSP transcription depending on heat, abiotic or oxidative stress response. In plants, HSPsare chaperones that assist in protein folding, preventing their irreversible aggregation during stress.However, it is currently known that they are present in cells during other biological processes likegermination and fruit maturation. Chenopodium quinoa (quinoa) is an allotetraploid (2n = 4x = 36) cropspecies belonging to the Chenopodiacea family, whose grains are consumed as cereal, although they area good quality protein source. Quinoa represents a model to study HSPs because of an intrinsic toleranceto abiotic stress, like high salinity, water shortage and light intensity. At the same time, it is sensitive tohigh temperatures. We already reported 75 putative small (s) HSP coding gene sequences about genome(v2) and in this work we explored the upstream region, defined in 1000 pb, of a group of genes closelylocated in chromosome 4B (Cq4B). Each upstream sequence was retrieved and filtered with an ad-hocPython script. HSE were scanned in each gene´s putative promoter region using the RSAT platform.Results: The high number of sHSP sequences reported is congruent with other plant species, which show20 to 70 members, approximately. We also observed possible duplication events in some chromosomes,an evolutionary mechanism reported in the expansion of the HSP gene family. Among the tandem copyarranged selected genes CQ020271 (567 bp), CQ020272 (549 bp), CQ020274 (555 bp), CQ020275 (522bp), CQ020276 (552 bp), CQ020278 (609 bp) located in Cq4B, HSEs were only detected in CQ020272 andCQ020276 promoters, indicating a possible Hsf-dependent regulation characterized in the HSP genefamily.Conclusions: These observations support previous findings on sHSP subfamily characterization in otherplant species of agronomic interest including Arabidopsis sp., tomato, potato, cotton, wheat, barley orsorghum. Further approaches could be conducted to characterize gene expression profiles of nearlyduplicated genes (or tandem copy-located genes).