Predição e análise do potencial codificante de pequenas janelas abertas de leitura (sORFs) no genoma de Jatropha curcas L.

Abstract

The small Open Reading Frames (sORFs) are genomic regions between a start codon and a stop codon smaller than 300 base pairs. These regions are generally removed from genome projects annotations due its high false positive rates. However, several studies shown the importance of the small peptides (sPEPs) derived from the sORFs in plant and animal morphogenesis, but the information about their physiological function is still scarce. The physic nut (Jatropha curcas L.) is a plant with high potential to the production of biodiesel in Brazil, but there are still a lot of obstacles that hamper its large scale production. There are few comercial cultivars of this species and there is a lack of knowledge about the appropriate nutritional conditions for its growth. To assess the sORFs’ coding potential, the prediction and filtering, which consists in the conservation analysis and search for protein domains, were performed, generating 446 novel putative sORFs with coding potential from a total of 3.734.705 initial sORFs. Furthermore, an enrichment analysis of the Gene Ontology terms from the domains from the sORFs was performed, and 8 sORFs were related to the lipid biosynthesis, 1 sORFs were related specifically to the fatty acid biosynthesis, and 8 sORFs were related to the process of anatomic morphogenesis. The results obtained can be used to help future functional genomics research that aim to understand the function of the small ORFs of the physic nut, providing valuable information to the improvement of agronomic features of the cultivars for the production of biodiesel and other products.