Bioinformatics studies on structures, functions and diversifications of rolling leaf related genes in rice (Oryza sativa L.)

Leaf morphology of crop plants has significant value in agronomy. Leaf rolling in rice plays a vital role to increase grain yield. However, collective information on the rolling leaf (RL) genes reported to date and different comparative bioinformatics studies of their sequences are still incomplete. This bioinformatics study was designed to investigate structures, functions and diversifications of the RL related genes reported till now through several studies. We performed different comparative and functional analyses of the selected 42 RL genes among 103 RL genes using different bioinformatics techniques including gene structure, conserved domain, phylogenetic, gene ontology (GO), transcription factor (TF), Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) and protein–protein network. Exon-intron organization and conserved domain analysis showed diversity in structures and conserved domains of RL genes. Phylogenetic analysis classified the proteins into five major groups. GO and TF analyses revealed that regulation-related genes were remarkably enriched in biological process and 10 different TF families were involved in rice leaf rolling. KEGG analysis demonstrated that 14 RL genes were involved in the KEGG pathways, among which 50% were involved in the metabolism pathways. Of the selected RL proteins, 55% proteins were non-interacting with other RL proteins and OsRL9 was the most interacting RL protein. These results provide important information regarding structures, conserved domains, phylogenetic revolution, protein–protein interactions and other genetic bases of RL genes which might be helpful to the researchers for functional analysis of new candidate RL genes to explore their characteristics and molecular mechanisms for high yield rice breeding.