Asian Research Thesis Index

Abstract

Ziarat juniper ( M. Bieb) is an evergreen and dominant species of Balochistan juniper forests. These forests are providing many benefits to regional ecosystems and surrounding populations. Unfortunately Ziarat juniper forest is in a degraded condition because of large number of biotic and abiotic factors including die back disease, dwarf mistletoe ( ) an obligate parasite with an endophytic ''root'' system. To protect these rapidly degrading Juniper forests the current project was aimed to identify dwarf resistant genes in Identification and characterization of differentially expressed genes in dwarf mistletoe infested and noninfested shoots were performed using Suppression Subtractive Hybridization (SSH), Next Generation Sequencing (NGS) and bioinformatics algorithms. In this dissertation a total of 1951 dwarf mistletoe resistant genes were identified with 1257 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) from dwarf mistletoe infested and 694 DEGs from dwarf mistletoe non-infested shoots of Juniper tree. All the identified resistant genes were further functionally characterized by using Gene ontologies (GO). The identified resistant genes were observed to be involved in various significant functions related with stress, immune system, metabolism, transcription factor, signaling pathway and structural protein. All of these newly identified resistant genes were reported in for the first time as no functional genomics study is reported for this important plant. These results will be used to manipulate the Juniper trees with these resistant genes for higher expression to combat and defeat the disease.

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