Genome- Wide Identification of Auxin Response factor ( ARF) Genes and Expression analysis in Capsicum Fruits

Abstract

One of the important plant transcription factors is Auxin Response Factor (ARF), which has vital role in regulation of growth and development of the plants, and stress tolerance. ARFs key regulator is the phyto-hormone Auxin. Very less investigation has been done about ARF family of pepper (Capsicum annuum) and their roles in biological processes. From the available updated genome database, 28 ARF genes were identified in pepper genome and 24 of them are distributed on 12 different chromosome and 4 are found to be pseudogenes. A phylogenetic tree was constructed depending on ARFs sequences derived from Pepper, Tomato, Arabidopsis, Potato and Rice and Simple Sequence Repeats (SSRs) were identified present in Capsicum ARF. In this study, expression of selected 12 ARF genes in fruits (developmental stage: early, breaker and mature) of two distinct Capsicum species (Capsicum annuum and Capsicum chinense) were analyzed in transcriptome level. Confirmation of expression analysis was done by quantitative real time PCR (qRTPCR). The preliminary results of our experiment elucidates, ARF plays significant role in fruit development of pepper. This result will provide for identifying proper function and molecular breeding studies of ARF genes in pepper in forthcomingdays.

Keywords: Transcription factor, plant hormone, transcriptome, quantitative real time PCR (qRT-PCR), molecular breeding