Backgroud
Elephant grass (
Cenchrus purpureus
) is a perennial forage grass characterized by tall plants, high biomass and wide adaptability. Low-temperature stress severely limits elephant grass biomass and geographic distribution. WRKY is one of the largest families of plant-specific transcription factors and plays important roles in plant resistance to low-temperature. However, the understanding of the WRKY family in grasses is limited. In this study, we conducted a genome-wide characterization of WRKY proteins in elephant grass, including gene structure, phylogeny, expression, conserved motif organization, and functional annotation, to identify key CpWRKY candidates involved in cold tolerance.
Results
In this study, a total of 176
WRKY
genes were identified in elephant grass. It was found that 172 were unevenly distributed across its 14 chromosomes, while the remaining 4 genes were not anchored to any chromosome. The genes were classified into three groups based on their WRKY conserved domains and zinc finger motifs. There were 12, 8, 19, 27, 12, 18 and 80 CpWRKYs belonging to group I, group IIa, group IIb, group IIc, group IId, group IIe and group III, respectively. We hypothesized that the ancient subgroup IIc
WRKY
gene is the ancestor of all
WRKY
genes in elephant grass. Most
CpWRKYs
in the same group have similar structure and motif composition. A total of 169 duplicate gene pairs were identified, suggesting that segmental duplication might have contributed to the expansion of the
CpWRKY
gene family. Ka/Ks analysis revealed that most of the
CpWRKYs
were subjected to purifying selection during the evolution. It was also found that six genes (
CpWRKY51
,
CpWRKY81
,
CpWRKY100
,
CpWRKY101
,
CpWRKY140
and
CpWRKY143
) exhibited higher expression in roots compare to leaves, and were significantly induced by low temperature stress. Among them,
CpWRKY81
had the highest expression under low-temperature stress, and its over-expression significantly enhanced the cold tolerance in yeast.
Conlusions
In this study, we characterized
WRKY
genes in elephant grass and further investigated their physicochemical properties, evolution, and expression patterns under low-temperature stress. This research provides valuable resources for identifying key
CpWRKY
genes that contribute to cold tolerance in elephant grass.
Supplementary Information
The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1186/s12864-024-10844-8.
