IN SILICO CHARACTERIZATION OF PUTATIVE ZAT10 GENE IN Stevia rebaudiana ACCESSION MS007

Stevia rebaudiana is among recognized medicinal plants used as an artificial sweetener in food and drinks as it contains very low sugar content. It is recognized that stevia contains component steviol glycoside which contains stevioside and rebaudioside A has 50 to 100 more sweetness than sucrose. Due to this, stevia extraction of steviol glycoside is very demanded in the food and pharmaceutical industries. Research shows that stevioside levels are the highest at the time of flower bud formation and lower at the time preceding and following flower bud formation. Hence, this study aims to identify and characterize the putative gene that may involve in the flowering of local S. rebaudiana accession MS007 from the analysis of bioinformatics tools. The outcome of this study will help further in the study of the manipulation of the flowering process to increase the outcome yield of steviol glycoside. This study involves characterization of putative zinc finger ZAT10 gene by homology search by BLAST, protein domain search using InterPro, physicochemical analysis using ProtParam and TMHMM, multiple sequence alignment using MUSCLE, and phylogenetic tree construction using MEGA. The bioinformatics analysis using these programs and software manages to identify the protein domain of ZAT10 which shows the function of metal ion binding and involve in transcriptional regulation. The analysis of the phylogenetic tree also shows that ZAT10 protein may have a recent common ancestor in its own Asteraceae families such as Lactuca sativa and Heliantus annus.