In-silico Prediction of Cis-regulatory Elements and Functional Domains of Salt-stress ESTs in Glycine max

Glycine max (Soybean) is a nutritionally important crop which provides an abundant source of oil and protein for global human consumption. Soil salinity is one of the major environmental stresses which cause a significant loss of productivity in world agriculture, especially in irrigated lands. The productivity of soybean is also significantly hampered by salinity stress, thus reducing the yield by imposing negative impact on growth and agronomic traits. Salinity stress comes from genes that limit the rate of salt uptake from the soil and the transport of salt throughout the plant. The present report identifies the salt stress responsive genes and transcription factor binding sites (TFBS) in soybean by using in-silico approaches on the contigs derived from assembling ESTs from public domain. Further, domains and signature sequences were identified and functionally annotated. Furthermore, chromosomal location of the contigs was identified and the ORF regions were also studied. The results show that most of the contigs which were derived from the Expressed Sequence Tags are found to be involved in the catalytic activity, binding activity and in translating ribosomal proteins. The functional prediction of the genes depicts that most of the proteins are uncharacterized, while, some of them are found to be having enzymatic role involved in major metabolic synthesis pathways. Later on, the cis-regulatory elements and their role were studied which are present in the contigs. The contigs were then analyzed for the identification of domains and protein categorization.