Genome-Wide Identification and Expression Analysis of WRKY Transcription Factors in : A Bioinformatics Study.

WRKY transcription factors have been found in most plants and play an important role in regulating organ growth and disease response. Outlining the profile of genes is a very useful project for studying morphogenesis and resistance formation. In the present study, a total of 63 genes consisting of 13 class I, 41 class II, and 9 class III genes were identified from the newly published genome, of which 62 were physically distributed on all 16 chromosomes. Structurally, two genes ( and ) contained four domains, and lacked the typical heptapeptide structure. Evolutionarily, 42, 16, and 5 genes experienced whole genome duplication (WGD) or fragmentation, dispersed duplication, and tandem duplication, respectively; 28 Ka/Ks values of 30 pairs of homologous genes were far lower than 1, while those of orthologous gene pairs between and reached up to 2.07. Transcriptome analysis showed that many of the genes were generally expressed at a low level in 12 fruit samples consisting of three tissues, including rind, flesh, and seeds, at four developmental stages, and interaction analysis between and genes containing W-boxes suggested that could play a role in plant disease resistance by positively regulating . In summary, the gene family of was systemically characterized for the first time, and the data and information obtained regarding could be very useful in further theoretically elucidating the molecular mechanisms of plant development and response to pathogens and practically improving favorable traits such as disease resistance.