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Dehydration is the most crucial environmental factor that considerably effects plant growth. Most plants have a very little capacity to accommodate stress. The set of dehydration responses depends upon severity and duration of dehydration, plant genotypes, and developmental stages of plant.
Plants alter their cellular metabolism and activating various defence machineries in response to stress. Mechanisms that operate signal perception, transduction, and downstream regulatory events provide valuable information about the underlying pathways involved in environmental stress responses. Nucleus, the control centre of eukaryotic cell, houses most of the genetic machineries required for gene expression and their regulation. Study of nuclear proteome particularly phosphoproteins is of great importance as phosphorylation has the potential to modify a wide variety of cellular processes but its functional connectivity, in plants, is still elusive.
The nuclear phosphoproteome profile of chickpea was studied to gain better understanding of such event. A novel dehydration responsive phosphoprotein was identified. Domain analysis of the protein sequence using InterProScan revealed the presence of Calcium-Lipid Binding (CLB) domain. The gene was hence designated as CaCLB1. This gene which encodes for a 738 amino acid protein with an approximate molecular weight of 81.18 kDa was cloned for further analysis. In order to evaluate the phylogenetic and evolutionary relationship of CLB domain, its amino acid sequence was aligned with orthologs from other plants as well as animals and an unrelated phylogram was generated. Also quantitative RT-PCR was performed to investigate the expression patterns of CaCLB1 in response to dehydration, abscisic acid, methyl vilogen, salicylic acid and jasmonic acid. The promoter analysis of CaCLB1 using PlantCare revealed the presence of several stress responsive cis-acting elements. Further analysis needs to be carried out to elucidate the role of CaCLB1 in dehydration response in chickpea.
Key Words: Dehydration stress, C2-domain, Phosphoproteins, Nuclear Proteome and Gene Cloning
