Molecular Cloning, Expression and Insilco Analysis of Drought Stress Inducible MYB Transcription Factor Encoding Gene From C4 Plant Eleusine Coracana

Abstract Drought is one of the key abiotic stresses that critically influences the crops by restraining their growth and yield potential. Being sessile, plant tackle the detrimental effects of drought stress via modulating the cellular state by changing the gene expression. Such alteration of gene expression is essentially driven by the transcriptional syndicate. Transcription factors (TF) are the key regulatory protein that controls the expression of their target gene by binding to the cis-regulatory elements present in the promoter region. Myb-TF subiquitously present in all eukaryotes belong to one of the largest TF family, and play wide array of biological functions in plants including anthocyanin biosynthesis, vasculature system, cell signaling, seed maturation and abiotc stress responses. In the present study, isolation, and molecular cloning of full length Myb TF from Eleusine corocana has been performed. The isolated full-length coding sequence has 1053 bp and 350 aa was submitted to NCBI (Accession number MT312253). The transcript level of EcMYB increases under different abiotic stress treatment including dehydration, salinity, and high temperature stress. The promoter region of EcMyb1 was found to be enriched in stress-responsive cis-regulatory elements such as DRE, HSE, ABRE etc. In phylogenetic analysis, EcMyb1 appeared to have high homology with its monocot orthologs particularly Sateria italica, Hordeum vulgare, Saccharum barberi and Oryza sativa. The three-dimension protein structure was generated based on homology modeling and structural aspects were discussed. Further, Insilco analysis was conducted to explore the physiological properties, subcellular localization, potential post-translational modification sites (phosphorylation and glycosylation sites), and molecular and biological function of full-length protein. Overall, the expression profiling and Insilco analysis of EcMyb1 strongly indicated its potential role in abiotic stress response in Eleusine corocana.