Stevia rebaudiana, or stevia, is a perennial herb native to the northern region of South America. It is commercially important due to the high level of non-caloric sweetening compound, which has been consumed worldwide as food and medicine. Stevioside is considered as the most important compound of steviol glycosides that functions as the main sweetener. Exposure of the stevia plant to long-day conditions (increased exposure to light) will delay the flowering process, which led to an increase in glycoside accumulation. The bioinformatics analysis of 5548 expressed sequence tags (ESTs) obtained from dbEST (NCBI) using the Blast2GO software and manual curation identified 7 ESTs that contain domains involved in the flowering process. The domains were the heat shock protein (Hsp) domain, squamosa promoter-binding protein (SBP) domain, CONSTANS, CO-like, and TOC1 (CCT) domains; K homology (KH) domain; and ubiquitin-conjugating enzyme domain (UBC).
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.