Expression Profiling of Selected Drought Responsive Genes in Pigeonpea (Cajanus cajan)

One of the most attractive features of pigeonpea, relative to other legume crops, is its tolerance to drought stress. In order to understand the molecular mechanism of this unique feature, 511 universally stressed protein (USP) were analyzed across the Viridiplantae database in an earlier study (Nature Biotechnology 2012, 30:83-89). Out of these 511 proteins, 427 showed homology with legumes and 111 of these proteins had homologous USP domain. The Pfam USP family PF00582 domain (E value cutoff of 1.0), using the Hidden Markov Models (HMM), has been searched in pigeonpea genome sequence (version 5.0). In brief, a total of 51 genes showed close similarity to USP domain. Subsequently, primer pairs were designed for all the selected 51 genes to undertake differential gene expression studies on three genotypes namely ICPL 151, ICPL 227 and ICPL 8755, segregating for drought tolerance. qRT-PCR assays are in progress and updated results will be presented in the conference. In summary, the study is expected to identify and validate drought responsive genes that could be useful for enhancing drought tolerance in other crops especially legume species.