Background: Protein kinases (PKs) play an important role in signaling cascades and are one of the largest and most conserved protein super families in plants. Despite their importance, the woodland strawberry (Fragaria vesca) kinome and expression patterns of PK genes remain to be characterized.
Results: Here, we report on the identification and classification of 954 Fragaria vesca PK genes, which were classified into nine groups and 124 gene families. These genes were distributed unevenly among the seven chromosomes, and the number of introns per gene varied from 0 to 47. Almost half of the putative PKs were predicted to localize to the nucleus and 24.6% were predicted to localize to the cell membrane. The expansion of the woodland strawberry PK gene family occurred via different duplication mechanisms and tandem duplicates occurred relatively late as compared to other duplication types. Moreover, we found that tandem and transposed duplicated PK gene pairs had undergone stronger diversifying selection and evolved relatively faster than WGD genes. The GO enrichment and transcriptome analysis implicates the involvement of strawberry PK genes in multiple biological processes and molecular functions in differential tissues, especially in pollens. Finally, 109 PKs, mostly the receptor-like kinases (RLKs), were found transcriptionally responsive to Botrytis cinerea infection.
Conclusions: The findings of this research expand the understanding of the evolutionary dynamics of PK genes in plant species and provide a potential link between cell signaling pathways and pathogen attack.
Keywords: Botrytis cinerea infection; Gene duplication; Receptor-like kinases (RLKs); Strawberry protein kinases; Transcript profiling.