A study conducted at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP) in Brazil identified orphan genes in wild sugarcane, Spontaneous sugar a species with exceptional resistance to biotic stresses such as nematodes, fungi, bacteria and other pests and diseases, and to abiotic stresses such as cold, drought, salinity and nutritionally deficient soils.
According to an article on the study published in the review Frontiers in plant science responsible scientists set out to see if the orphan genes in S.spontaneum played an important role in its stress resistance properties.
All living things have genes that closely resemble those in the genomes of other organisms. Plants, for example, share genes involved in photosynthesis. On the other hand, most organisms also have orphan or lineage-specific genes.
Orphan genes are genes found in a particular taxonomic group without significant sequence similarity to genes from other lineages. They are sometimes called taxonomically restricted genes for this reason.
Birds, for example, have very different genes than mammals. Recent research has shown that even organisms of closely related species belonging to the same genus can have genes not shared by other species.
The researchers were interested in S.spontaneum due to characteristics such as past whole genome duplication events that resulted in multiple copies of the same gene. Scientific evidence suggests that orphan genes may arise from copies of pre-existing genes whose sequences change over time due to mutations and end up differing entirely from the original sequences.
Another possible explanation for the origin of orphan genes could be the reorganization of genomic regions that do not encode genes, frequently observed in organisms with complex genomes, such as sugarcane.
“In the study, we identified parts of the genome of S.spontaneum that have no similarity with the genes of another organism. We think they may be responsible for physiological traits or species-specific properties,” said Claudio Benicio Cardoso-Silva, first author of the article. He conducted the project as part of postdoctoral research at UNICAMP’s Center for Molecular Biology and Genetic Engineering (CBMEG), with The support of FAPESP.
“During the evolution of these plants, certain genes were more or less expressed in response to various types of abiotic stress, in particular cold. This may mean that they are regulated due to these constraints,” said Cardoso-Silva, whose postdoctoral research was supervised by Anete Pereira de Souza professor of plant genetics at the UNICAMP Institute of Biology and last author of the article.
The researchers don’t think they can conclusively conclude that the orphan genes they identified make the plant more stress tolerant based on the study results. “But the fact that they are regulated under stressful conditions serves as a wake-up call to the possibility that they may play an important role in these processes,” he said.
The next step will consist in experimenting on plants subjected to different types of stress in order to study the behavior of orphan genes in terms of expression, compared to non-stressed plants. Once the best candidate genes are confirmed, biotechnology applications involving their insertion into commercially valuable plants can be investigated, leading in the future to the possibility of developing sugarcane varieties that are more resistant to environmental pressures.
“We highlighted this possibility for anyone who wants to use the data from the article for further research, or for scientists who work on gene transformation and editing, which is a different area of research, to choose a or two genes as candidates and do validation,” said Cardoso-Silva, who continues to work with genomics at Rio de Janeiro Northern State University (UENF). evolutionary aspect of gene family expansion,” he explained.
Cardoso-Silva spent a year at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, with a FAPESP scholarship.
“Today we have CRISPR [ the gene editing technique ]which offers biotech professionals a chance to select genes for drought, salinity, cold or heat tolerance at a time when crop resilience with fewer inputs is paramount,” Souza said. .
About the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP)
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