Leucoanthocyanidin Reductase (LAR) Gene Analysis

Abstract

Leucoanthocyanidin reductase (LAR) catalyzes the synthesis of catechin that is first step in PA biosynthesis. LAR involved in production of the flavan-3-ol. LAR gene is involved in proanthocyanidine production in several plants. Proanthocyanidins are plant secondary metabolites and occur in a wide range of plants and play an important role in defense against herbivores. The analysis of 50 proteins by global alignment of EF148325 with other ortholog sequences which have roles in production of proanthocyanidins using FASTA provide details of all 50 sequences to see the biological activity and the functional annotations of related proteins and suggest that the protein product of this gene may have role in the proanthocyanidin production in the flavonoid pathways. In this study, the role of an unknown gene is characterized by protein pattern analysis, domain analysis and sequence similarity search. Program CLUSTAL W was used to generate multiple sequence alignment and phylogenetic tree by neighbor-joining method of multiple sequence alignment. PLN02657, PLN00016, NmrA domains show closeness to the EF148325 phylogenetic tree of different species containing LAR leucoanthocyanidin reductase of Vitis vinifera similar to protein EF148325 of the populous hybrid. B8LPG8_PICSI putative uncharacterized protein shows the minimum distance of 0.00026 and A9NW98 shows second minimum distance of 0.00255. Both proteins show maximum similarity with protein EF148325 of the populous hybrid. Structures of LAR and domain model are also aligned to visualize the common residues which are glycine, arginine, proline, alanine, glutamic acid, aspragene showing 14.78% identity between two sequences using CHIMERA visualization tool. Protein pattern analysis characterizes the biological activities of an unknown gene through the presence of phosphorylation site, N-glycosylation, N-myristoylation site and amidation site.