| Transcription factors are important regulators to activate or repress the expression of coding or non-coding genes, through which they can further influence or control many biological processes. In plants, as in all living organisms, transcription factors are an important level of gene regulation. Many families of transcription factors have been identified in plants. Analysis of the Arabidopsis genome reveals many transcription factor families, at least 16 of which appear to be unique to plants. In these families, MADS-box and Homeobox genes form two large gene families of transcription factors that control fundamental processes of plant development. In addition, SBP-box gene family belongs to a group of plant-specific zinc-finger protein genes that encode plant-specific transcription factors. In recent years, some reports show that Homeobox, MADS and SBP are related in berry fruit ripening.In this paper, using EST data, we report a number of genes, especially some transcription factors that possibly are involved in tomato fruit development. The result has been the opening of a new frontier in ripening molecular biology that is focused on upstream transcriptional control. The research of these transcription factors involved berry fruit ripening is only get from tomato, few studies are performed in other berry species, such as grape and pepper. In this paper, a genome-wide characterization of the three transcription families has been conducted in the grapevine.Here, we provide a complete overview of these families, describing the gene structure, gene expression, genome localization, protein motif organization, and phylogenetic relationship of each member. The comparison of the three transcription factor families in homolog and expression patterns between grape and tomato suggested that these transcription fators in grape might play an important role in the regulation of fruit ripening. The comprehensive annotation in these transcription factors investigations adds to our understanding and identifies candidate genes for future functional validation studies.In addition, we isolated and characterized two novel transcription factors, CaRIN and CaSPL, from the chili pepper Capsicum annuum L. cv. Bukang. Sequence analysis revealed that they share significant sequence identify with, respectively, a known MADS-box protein (LeMADS-RIN) and an SBP-box protein (LeSPL-CNR).Phylogenetic trees with other MADS-box and SBP-box proteins suggest that CaRIN and CaSPL fall into separate clades in MADS-box and SBP-box respectively. Prediction of DNA-binding sites indicates that CaRIN and CaSPL proteins may have specific sequences capable of binding DNA. Their expression profiles in pepper tissues show that their expression paterns are similar with LeMADS-RIN and LeSPL-CNR. All of these results suggest that CaRIN and CaSPL are involved in pepper fruit ripening. |
