ABSTRACT
SUBRAMANIAN RADHESH KRISHNAN1, PANDIYAN MUTHURAMALINGAM1,2, CHAKRAVARTHI MOHAN3, and MANIKANDAN RAMESH1,4,*
1Department of Biotechnology, Alagappa University, Karaikudi, Tamil Nadu 630003, India, Tel.: +91 4565 225215, Mob.: +91 9566422094, Fax: +914565225202, E-mail: radheshkrishnan.s@gmail.com 2pandianmuthuramalingam@gmail.com, Mob.: +919597771342 3Molecular Biology Laboratory (LBM), Department of Genetics and Evolution (DGE), Federal University of Sao Carlos (UFSCar), São Paulo 13565905, Brazil, Tel.: +551633518378, Mob.: +5516996196465, E-mail: chakra3558@gmail.com 4Mob.: +91 9442318200, Fax: +914565225202 *Corresponding author. E-mail: mrbiotech.alu@gmail.com
1.1 INTRODUCTION
Plants are sessile and hence are confronted by the surrounding environment; this is a major constraint to their growth and development. Crop yield is severely affected by the climate change and rise in the temperature through global warming which drastically reduces the water withholding capacity of the soil and thereby crop production (Lesk et al., 2016). These stimuli are evoked by numerous molecular and biochemical crosstalk that activate the candidate component to resist stress. These actions are packed with stimulation of receptor molecules by stress followed by a series of
molecular crosstalk that promote downstream process and activate the genes for its survival. Over the decades, plants have evolved to tackle these stresses by more sophisticated mechanisms than the animals (Qin et al., 2011; Rejeb et al., 2014). In crop plants, such as rice Oryza sativa L., production and quality are adversely hampered by biotic and abiotic stresses. There are various key proteins that are generated by the plant immune system against these stresses and are largely being regulated by their respective transcription factors (Kavar et al., 2008). Certain stress regulators act as transcription binding factors such as DRE/CRT; DREBs/ CBFs; HSF/heat shock proteins (HSPs) and MAPKs that are highly conserved domains in plants and hence are the key regions for researchers to explore abiotic stress resistance (Mizoi et al., 2012; Nakashima et al., 2012; Hussain Wani et al., 2016). Such a class of conserved domains are A20/AN1 stress-associated proteins (SAPs) that exists as zinc-finger domain proteins (ZFPs) (Mukhopadhyay et al., 2004; Kothari et al., 2016). ZFPs are rapidly evolving key research interests owing to their multiple genes, conservative nature, and wide host range compatibility; O. sativa (Mukhopadhyay et al., 2004), Nicotiana tabacum (Kanneganti and Gupta, 2008), Arabidopsis thaliana (Dixit and Dhankher, 2011a) and Camellia sinensis L (Paul and Kumar, 2015). The presence of these proteins has also been reported in other living systems such as bacteria and animals (Huang et al., 2004; Hishiya et al., 2006; Zhang et al., 2015). The first report on A20 zinc-finger domain and its multiple motifs (cys2/cys2) from human endothelial cells was reported by Dixit et al. (1990). These were characterized for their role to combat the effects induced by multiple stresses (Vij and Tyagi, 2007). Up till now 18 members of A20/AN1 SAPs from different rice species have been reported (Dansana et al., 2014). In this chapter, OsiSAP8 was used as the candidate to explain the importance of ZFPs and their role in abiotic stress tolerance by comparing it with the available omics-based resources.
