In silico analysis of regulatory elements of heavy metal inducible promoters to improve plant resilience in panicum a potential bioenergy crop

The study involves prediction of transcription factor binding sites (TFBS) on upstream sequences of heavy metal responsive genes in panicum to understand the possible gene regulation and transcriptional control involved in heavy metal resistance towards improving plant resilience. In this study the model monocot plant and a non-food bioenergy crop panicum was chosen. The TFBS were predicted for 5 heavy metal responsive genes for transcription factors (TFs) belonging to NAC and WRKY family using bioinformatic tools TSSP and PlantPAN3.0. Promoters were predicted on all upstream sequences selected that had LDF (linear discriminative function) threshold value above 0.02 for TATA box at a given position. All the predicted transcription factor binding sequences for NAC, WRKY TFs on the putative promoters had position weight matrix scores above 0.95. The sequences falling within these threshold values could represent possible TFBs for NAC and WRKY TFs on the predicted promoters for the heavy metal responsive genes Motifs corresponding to the NAC transcription factor matrix ID 382 were located in the upstream sequences of 4 heavy metal responsive genes and not located in the gene NRT1.1 and the WRKY transcription factor binding motifs corresponding to the transcription matrix ID 445 were located in the upstream sequences of 4 heavy metal responsive genes and not located in the gene NRT1.1 in the current study.