Wenli Sun , Jianxin Shi

Joint International Research Laboratory of Metabolic & Developmental Sciences, School of Life Sciences and Biotechnology, Shanghai Jiaotong University, Shanghai, 200240, P.R. China
Author    Correspondence author
Rice Genomics and Genetics, 2021, Vol. 12, No. 1   doi: 10.5376/rgg.2021.12.0001
Received: 07 Jun., 2021    Accepted: 12 Jul., 2021    Published: 30 Jul., 2021

This article was first published in Molecular Plant Breeding in Chinese, and here was authorized to translate and publish the paper in English under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Sun W.L., and Shi J.X., 2021, Identification and bioinformatic analysis of the ASAT gene family in Oryza staiva, Rice Genomics and Genetics, 12(1): 1-16 (doi: 10.5376/rgg.2021.12.0001)

Rice bran oil is rich in bioactive steryl ferulates that are important not only for seed development, drought stress and lipid metabolism, but also for grain nutrition quality and human healthy. However, its complete compositions and associated metabolic pathways are poorly understood. Arabidopsis thaliana Acyl-CoA Sterol Acyltransferase1 (AtASAT1) is the only one in the superfamily of Membrane-Bound O-Acyltransferases that has ASAT activity, which prefers saturated fatty acyl-CoAs as acyl donors and cycloartenol as the acyl acceptor. Overexpression of AtASAT1 in Arabidopsis results in a strong accumulation of cycloartenol fatty acyl esters accompanied by an increase of the whole steryl esters contents in seeds. Here we present our bioinformatic based analysis data aiming to identify more plant ASAT family members and to in silico study of them in rice. We identified 105 ASAT Family members from public genome database of 10 plant species including Arabidopsis and tomato, and the phylogenetic tree of ASAT family constructed revealed evolutionary relationships of ASAT family members between oil-bearing crop and non-oil-bearing species, and between monocotyledons and dicotyledons. We further investigated into physical and chemical properties of 14 OsASAT proteins, and chromosome distributions, structures and promoter sequences, and expression patterns of corresponding OsASAT genes, providing a solid theoretical basis for further study of the biological functions of OsASAT proteins.

Sterol esterification; ASAT; Protein structure; Molecular evolution; Expression pattern