Vol. 8, Issue 1 (2019)

Author(s):
Suman Dutta, Vignesh Muthusamy, Rajkumar U Zunjare, Rakesh Bhowmick and Firoz Hossain

Abstract:
The Fatty acid hydroxylase (FAH) superfamily in plant is a broad group of proteins comprising carotene and fatty acid hydroxylases, and sterol desaturases. Favourable allele of FAH superfamily gene, β-carotene hydroxylase (crtRB1) was introgressed through marker assisted selection for enrichment of provitamin-A in maize. In this study, putative FAH genes were identified in maize and rice genome, and physicochemical properties of ZmFAH proteins were predicted. A total of twenty nine and twenty two FAH genes were found in maize and rice, respectively. Phylogenetic analysis revealed a total of four clades in ZmFAHs and OsFAHs and predominantly contain transmembrane domain. Isoelectric point of ZmFAH proteins varied from 6.23 to 10.48. Phylogenetic tree and intron exon organization revealed that member within a group had similar gene structure and almost well distributed across ten chromosomes in maize. In-silico expression of ZmFAH genes indicates their differential expression across different tissues. Therefore it may be speculated that FAH family members in a single group may have similar function.