Plants always have to fight against various environmental stress conditions like cold, drought, salinity, submergence, etc. The prime target of recent research in plant biology is to unveil the intricate series of events in responses and adaptation to different stress conditions. Sufficient in-silico computational studies are yet to be done to distinguish the stress related genes from the non-stress related ones. As common mechanisms of stress responses exist among different plants, we sought to identify the general structural and functional features that may be hidden in stress related genes of different plant species. We assumed that these features in stress-related genes might be different from non stress related genes. One hundred and sixty stress-responsive genes from five different plant species were studied. Computational and bioinformatics studies were done to determine several structural properties like length of gene, exon, intron, UTRs as well as to identify overrepresented sequence motif and enrichment of gene ontology (GO) functions. The UTRs of stress related genes were found to be significantly different from non-stress related genes and a “G-C” rich small sequence motif was found to be associated significantly with stress genes. Key biological processes like small GTPase mediated signal transduction, cellular components like thylakoid and molecular functions like oxidoreductase activity are significantly enriched for stress related genes. Further studies are required to identify more stress specific features of plant stress genes which may help to establish a computational model for detecting stress related genes from various gene lists.
Author(s): Ashraful Islam Bhuiya, and Abul B.M.M.K. Islam