Title

Analysis of osmotin, a PR protein as metabolic modulator in plants 

Authors

Malik Zainul Abdin^1*, Usha Kiran², Afshar Alam³

Affiliation

¹Department of Biotechnology, Faculty of Science, Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi-110062, India; ²Faculty of Engineering and Interdisciplinary Sciences, Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi-110062, India; ³Department of Computer Science, Jamia Hamdard, New Delhi-110062, India 

Email

mzabdin@rediffmail.com

+91-11-26059688, Extn: 5583

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

Received November 01, 2010; Accepted December 04, 2010; Published January 22, 2011
 

Osmotin is an abundant cationic multifunctional protein discovered in cells of tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum L. var Wisconsin 38) adapted to an environment of low osmotic potential. Beside its role as osmoregulator, it provides plants protection from pathogens, hence also placed in the PRP family of proteins. The osmotin induced proline accumulation has been reported to confer tolerance against both biotic and abiotic stresses in plants including transgenic tomato and strawberry overexpressing osmotin gene. The exact mechanism of induction of proline by osmotin is however, not known till date. These observations have led us to hypothesize that osmotin could be regulating these plant responses through its involvement either as transcription factor, cell signal pathway modulator or both in plants. We have therefore, undertaken the present investigation to analyze the osmotin protein as transcription factor using bioinformatics tools. The results of available online DNA binding motif search programs revealed that osmotin does not contain DNA-binding motifs. The alignment results of osmotin protein with the protein sequence from DATF showed the homology in the range of 0-20%, suggesting that it might not contain a DNA binding motif. Further to find unique DNA-binding domain, the superimposition of osmotin 3D structure on modeled Arabidopsis transcription factors using Chimera also suggested absence of the same. However, evidence implicating osmotin in cell signaling were found during the study. With these results, we therefore, concluded that osmotin is not a transcription factor, but regulating plant responses to biotic and abiotic stresses through cell signaling. 

Keywords

Osmotin, Osmoregulator, DNA binding motifs, Alignment.  

Citation

Abdin et al. Bioinformation 5(8): 336-340 (2011)

Edited by

Venkatarajan S Mathura

ISSN

0973-2063

Publisher

Biomedical Informatics

License

This is an Open Access article which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. This is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License.