Base Excision Repair in Sugarcane – A New Outlook

Abstract

The base excision repair (BER) pathway has been associated with genome integrity maintenance. Owing to its central role, BER is present in all three domains of life. The studies in plants, considering BER, have been conducted using Arabidopsis and rice models. Therefore, future studies regarding BER are required in other organisms, particularly in crops such as sugarcane, to understand its mechanism, which may reflect the uniqueness of DNA repair in monocots. Our previous results have revealed that sugarcane is an interesting plant for studying this pathway considering the polyploidy genome and genome evolution. This chapter aimed to characterize the BER pathway in sugarcane by using different bioinformatics tools, for example, screening for BER homologs in the sugarcane genome to identify its members. Each sequence obtained was subjected to structural analysis, and certain differences were identified when Arabidopsis was compared to other monocots, including sugarcane. Moreover, ROS1, DEM, and DML3 were not identified as a complete sequence in the sugarcane EST database. Furthermore, FEN1 is present as two sequences, namely FEN1A and FEN1B, both featuring different amino acid sequence and motif presence. Furthermore, FEN1 sequence was selected for further characterization considering its evolutionary history, as sequence duplication was observed only in the Poaceae family. Considering the importance of this protein for BER pathway, this sequence was evaluated using protein models (3D), and a possible conservation was observed during protein–protein interaction. Thus, these results help us understand the roles of certain BER components in sugarcane, and may reveal the aspects and functions of this pathway beyond those already established in the literature.