Abstract:
Climate has changed drastically over the last decade. It is crucial to understand the needs of
the plants and their adaptive mechanism that help them survive during adverse environmental
conditions. Abiotic stressors mainly salt concentration, osmotic stress, heat stress, drought,
flooding, etc. affect plants significantly. In this research work, we have done the
identification and characterization of the Universal Stress Protein (USP) gene family in
wheat. In-silico approaches such as identification, gene ontologies, chromosomal mapping,
circus, and synteny analysis were used to analyze the reported sequences. The study revealed
that the domain architecture plays the most significant role in the multi-functional features of
this family which is present in all plants. Moreover, the syntenic relationship revealed the
conservancy among the monocot genomes. The role of USP in host cells was explored
through studies/tools such as subcellular localization and gene ontologies The presence of
several regulatory elements also gave insight into stress-specific modulation and regulation.
Furthermore, protein modeling of the TaUSP genes revealed the presence of binding pockets
with functionally important amino acids This work led us to report a total of 107 protein
sequences on the ABD genome grouped into 34 TaUSP genes. Further instigations such as
expression profiling might help in verifying the stress-specific transcriptional modulation of
these genes. Hence, this work would be quite useful in developing economically stress resilient varieties.
