Identification of Putative Osmotic Stress-Responsive Genes in Canola by in Silico Study of Cis-Regulatory Elements

Osmotic stress is a primary or side-effect of different kinds of a biotic stresses, especially salt and drought stress, leads to a significant reduction in plant growth, productivity, and yield. Canola is one of the important oil crops cultivated all-over the world. In this paper, known cis-regulatory elements that regulate genes involved in molecular responding to salt, drought, and abscisic acid conditions were used in order to identify relevant genes with a similar function in canola. Of 62384 unigenes retrieved from Brassica Genome Gateway database, 29 putative osmotic stress responsive genes were identified. In order to evaluate accuracy of the identified genes, GOBP, GO Slim-plant, co-expression, and PPI analysis were performed. GOBP analysis enriched the most of the genes (95%) as “response to stimulus” and GO Slim-plant analysis enriched the genes into “response to stress” and “response to a biotic stress stimulus”. Almost all identified genes had potential of expression under salt, drought, and abscisic acid treatments. For co-expression analysis, the gene expression profiling data were utilized and the results indicated that 25 of 29 identified genes had at least 0.46 correlations and 0.5 mutual connection. In predicted PPI network, there were interactions between proteins encoded by the identified genes. In this study, the identified osmotic stress responding genes could be introduced as candidate genes to be considered in genetic engineering of canola or would help to better understanding of molecular mechanisms of osmotic stress in canola at the cellular level.