Soumya Sharma

Brinjal is an important vegetable crop of India. Despite the importance of brinjal there is little molecular and genetic information available for Brinjal. As a vegetable crop brinjal suffers from major crop losses due to pests and diseases. Recent advances in genetic engineering technologies for example target specific genome editing using CRISPER/cas9 have empowered the scientific community with the most important weapon for modulating genomes for desired phenotypes. It requires detailed information of the gene and its function for being a suitable candidate for genetic editing. Enhanced Disease Susceptibility1 (EDS1), a key regulator of plant defense could become a suitable target for gene editing to manipulate host resistance. Arabidopsis thaliana EDS1 (AtEDS1) is the most deeply studied EDS1 protein with crystal structure in PDB (4NFU). In the present study an attempt to extract detailed information regarding this protein in brinjal has been done. Brinjal EDS1 (SmEDS1) protein coding sequence is extracted from brinjal genome database using tblastn taking AtEDS1 as a query sequence. Prediction of the coding sequence refined with the help of transcriptome assembly data. SmEDS1 gene has been found in the contig Sme2.5_09498.1 of eggplant draft genome assembly. The gene has 1806 nucleotide long coding sequence encoding for 602 amino acid long protein. The gene has the most common architecture with three exons as compared to EDS1 protein coding genes from other families. The comparative analysis of SmEDS1 protein along with 46 other species EDS1 proteins proved the strong sequence and structural conservation of this protein among plants. The incongruence in the sequence and structure based phylogenetic trees was observed that could be attributed due to the influence of difference between global alignment and conservation of sequence signatures or it could be possibly explained by the fact that sequences are related by phylogeny whereas structures by constraints on their functions and regulations. Deeper analyses of phylogenetic relationships based on EDS1 will facilitate its genetic manipulation for agronomic purposes.