Evaluation of flowering gene family APETALA in legumes: a case study of chickpea

Flowering gene family is considered as one of the largest expanded gene families in plants with its members contributing multiple roles in integrating flowering signals. Development of flower and their regulations have always been a critical issue in research and science community in most recent twenty years. Multiple plant genes co-regulate altogether in order to develop floral organs. Present piece of work was done to characterize the APETALA gene family in legume plant chickpea (Cicer arietinum L) along with their evolutionary association with other paralogues or orthologues. Sequence analysis revealed that in chickpea, the gene family APETALA comprises of three genes along with their multiple alleles. Phylogenetic analysis further confirmed that APETALA genes originally evolved into three main classes through convergence and further divergence within each class. In order to get chickpea transcripts, all those APETALA transcripts that showed homology with APETALA genes in model plant Arabidopsis thaliana were obtained from data base of chickpea. It was concluded that the results obtained from transcript analysis for these APETALA genes revealed higher transcript levels not only in floral parts but also in other tissues than flowers, so it was concluded that the role of these genes is not specific for just flowering.