In Silico Characterization of Mate Genes in Wheat

Abstract

Background: Multidrug and toxic compound extrusion (MATE) genes are a group of multidrug efflux transporters that widely exists in all living organisms and play a major role in the detoxification of heavy metals, metalloids, exogenous xenobiotics and endogenous secondary metabolites out of the cells. However, insilico analysis of MATE gene family in plant species is very limited and thus such analysis need to be elucidated in wheat.Results: We have identified forty-four MATE genes in wheat and categorized into seven families based on their phylogenetic analysis. Further, 43 genes were found to exhibit protein-protein interaction at the protein level by using STRING software. We observed that the maximum number of exons i.e., 14 was identified in genes TraesCS6A02G418800.1 and TraesCS6D02G407900.1. We employed MEME software to find protein motifs associated with the MATE genes where maximum number of motifs were set to 22. Here, the protein motifs among the families 1,2 and 3 were significantly different from the rest. We found that the majority of MATE genes were showing expressions during biotic stress conditions due to disease infestations and the highest level of expression was shown by the gene TraesCS5B02G326600.1 belonging to family 1 which got expressed during Fusarium head blight infestation by Fusarium graminearum after 4 days of inoculation by using Wheat expression browser tool. A total of 39 ternary plots consisting of homoeologous genes for 39 MATE genes, showing different level of expressions during biotic and abiotic stress conditions were composed, where we found 44 % of the triads tend to show non balanced expressions (extreme values) due to their higher tissue- specificity and greater intensity.Conclusion: The results obtained from this study indicated that total 44 MATE genes were found to be directly involved in the metabolism of wheat and were expressed during different biotic and abiotic stress conditions. So such genes can be further evaluated for their interaction with heavy toxic metal elements and sequestration from the cells.