Journal of Biotechnology & Biomaterials
Open Access

Abstract

The rapid accumulation of microarray data from multiple species provides a nun parallel scope to study the evolution of biological systems. Here we present a systematic comparison of gene-co-expression networks between three economically important major crops, namely wheat, rice and maize under water stress to elucidate common mechanisms that are conserved between aforementioned crops, as well as those that are crop specific. We inferred drought responsive co-expression networks from publically available expression arrays to reveal the interactions of drought-responsive genes underlying complex molecular mechanisms among the three species. The largest co-expression network was created for wheat (3321 nodes, 819 066 edges) followed by rice (2471 nodes, 600 155 edges) and maize (1779 nodes, 212 353 edges). A comparison of the co-expression networks of these three species showed that, under drought stress, rice had more signalling genes and comparatively fewer carbon-metabolizing genes than wheat and maize did. Osmoregulation could be a secondary mechanism for drought tolerance in rice because it had the lowest number of osmoregulating genes in its co-expression network among the three species. Of the 17 important drought-specific transcription factor (TF) families in the network, MYB was the most numerous in all, followed, by bHLH, ERF, C2H2, NAC, and bZIP with little variation in connectivity across the three species. The interaction of these genes offered fresh insights in studying the function of drought-responsive genes across species and in identifying the target pathways for improving drought tolerance.

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