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Functional Plant Biology Functional Plant Biology Society
Plant function and evolutionary biology
RESEARCH ARTICLE

Comprehensive analysis of 14-3-3 family genes and their responses to cold and drought stress in cucumber

Mingyuan Xu A # , Zhaoyang Hu A # , Wei Lai B , Shiqiang Liu A , Hao Wu C * and Yong Zhou https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8432-6678 A *
+ Author Affiliations
- Author Affiliations

A College of Bioscience and Bioengineering, Jiangxi Agricultural University, Nanchang 330045, China.

B College of Agronomy, Jiangxi Agricultural University, Nanchang 330045, China.

C Henry Fok College of Biology and Agriculture, Shaoguan University, Shaoguan 512005, China.

# These authors contributed equally to this paper

Handling Editor: Manuela Chaves

Functional Plant Biology 48(12) 1264-1276 https://doi.org/10.1071/FP21022
Submitted: 22 January 2021  Accepted: 10 September 2021   Published: 12 October 2021

© 2021 The Author(s) (or their employer(s)). Published by CSIRO Publishing

Abstract

The 14-3-3 proteins play essential roles in regulating various biological processes and abiotic stress responses in plants. However, there have been few studies of 14-3-3 family members in cucumber. Here, we identified a total of ten 14-3-3 genes (named as CsGF14aj) in the cucumber genome. These genes are unevenly distributed across six cucumber chromosomes, and six of them were found to be segmentally duplicated. A phylogenetic analysis of 14-3-3 proteins in cucumber and other plant species showed that they could be divided into two distinct groups (ε and non-ε). Members in the same group tend to have similar exon-intron structure and conserved motif patterns. Several hormone-, stress- and development-related cis-elements associated with transcriptional regulation were found in the promoters of CsGF14 genes. RNA-seq data showed that most CsGF14 genes have broad expression in different tissues, and some had preferential expression in specific tissues and variable expression at certain developmental stages during fruit development. Quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) results revealed that nearly all tested CsGF14 genes were significantly up-regulated under cold and drought stress at certain time points. These results provide important information about the functions of CsGF14 genes in cucumber.

Keywords: 14-3-3, 14-3-3 protein, cold stress, cucumber, drought stress, expression analysis, gene family, phylogeny.


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