COMPUTER ANALYSIS OF PLANT STRESS RESPONSE: GENE NETWORKS AND TRANSCRIPTIONAL REGULATION

The fundamental problem of research of plant resistance to external stress caused by pathogens at molecular level requires new interdisciplinary methods based on bioinformatics approaches, analysis of sequencing data, which in turn involves the development of specialized computer tools. We consider several fields of computer programs development for modeling plant gene networks, based on high-throughput genomic sequencing data, including plant pathogen sequencing (metagenome), creation of electronic plant bioinformatics resources, study of genome structure and evolution of model plants in terms of response to environmental stresses, to solve agrobiotechnological problems. Clusters of transcription factor binding sites in the genomes of model plants have been studied. The existence of non-random clusters of binding sites in the genomes studied has been shown. Clusters in the genome of Arabidopsis thaliana, including the response to stress, have been examined in detail. A hypothesis on the general nature of the distribution of clusters of binding sites in the genome by the number of different transcription factors, due to the properties of the regulatory gene network, has been proposed. The objectives of the study of plant genome structure are developed using several crop models of southern Russia as an example