Transcriptional activation of related small heat shock proteins (sHSPs) during ripening in Solanum lycopersicum (cv. Heinz 1706)

ARCE, DÉBORA P; KRSTICEVIC, FLAVIA J; SPETALE, FLAVIO; PISTILLI, ALEJANDRO D; PONCE, SERGIO D; TAPIA, ELIZABETH; PRATTA, GUILLERMO

Riviera Maya

Conferencia; SoIBio-IC&W2016. Bioinformatics & Computational Biology for Innovative Genomics; 2016

Sociedad Iberoamericana de Bioinformática

BackgroundSmall heat shock proteins (sHSPs) are triggered in response to stress situationsin all living organisms. Evolutionary gene relationships and expression profileshave been recently investigated for sHSPs in plant genomes (rice, potato and tomato) highlighting their importance maintaining of cellular homeostasis.ResultsAfter in silico analysis of gene promoter sequence, our results show that thepresence of heat shock element (HSE) in the regulatory region of sHSP is neededto trigger sHSP differential gene expression during tomato fruit ripening. In this regard, in Cluster I tandem duplicated sHSP genes the absence of the HSE motif in regulatory region results in the absence of differential gene expression. On the other hand, in the tandem duplicated sHSP genes of Cluster II a high diversity of TFBS families was found. A specific combination of HSE and high levels of expression (HLE) motifs was found and might be responsible for a particular expression pattern and transcript abundance of sHSP paralogous genes.ConclusionsThe unusual expression pattern during tomato fruit ripening of two sets of phylogenetic related sHSP genes may be explained by the particular architectureof their regulatory regions. In this regard, the high diversity of TFBS found in the regulatory regions of functional sHSPs, besides the essential presence of the HSE motif, raises the question about the relative importance of certain TFBS families in the behavior of sHSP gene family under different physiological andenvironmental conditions.