Title

Authors

Affiliation

Centre of Biotechnology, School of Pharmaceutical Sciences; Siksha O Anusandhan University, Bhubaneswar-751003, India

Email

rajkumar.joshi@yahoo.co.in; *Corresponding author

Fax

+91-9437684176

Article Type

Hypothesis

Date

Received September 17, 2011; Accepted September 19, 2011; Published October 14, 2011

AccD6 (acetyl coenzyme A (CoA) carboxylase), plays an important role in mycolic acid synthesis of Mitogen activated protein kinase (MAPK) cascades are universal signal transduction modules that play crucial role in plant growth and development as well as biotic and abiotic stress responses. 20 and 17 MAPKs have been characterized in Arabidopsis and rice respectively, which are used for identification of the putative MAPKs in other higher plants. However, no MAPK gene sequences have yet been characterized for asexually reproducing plants. We describe the analysis of MAPK EST sequences from Curcuma longa (an asexually reproducible plant of great medicinal and economic significance). The four Curcuma MAPKs contains all 11 MAPK conserved domains and phosphorylation-activation motif, TEY. Phylogenetic analysis grouped them in the subgroup A and C as identified earlier for Arabidopsis. The Curcuma MAPKs identified showed high sequence homology to rice OsMPK3, OsMPK4 and OsMPK5 suggesting the presence of similar key element in signaling biotic and abiotic stress responses. Although further in vivo and in vitro analysis are required to establish the physiological role of Curcuma MAPKs, this study provides the base for future research on diverse signaling pathways mediated by MAPKs in Curcuma longa as well as other asexually reproducing plants.

Keywords

Curcuma longa, expressed sequence tags, MAPKs,TBLASTN

Citation

Joshi et al. Bioinformation 7(4): 180-183 (2011)
 

Edited by

P Kangueane

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.