Heat shock factor gene family in rice: Genomic organization and transcript expression profiling in response to high temperature, low temperature and oxidative stresses

Binding of heat shock factors (HSFs) with heat shock element sequence is critical for the transcriptional induction of heat shock genes. Rice genome sequence shows 26 OsHsf genes out of which 25 possess various important domains noted in HSFs i.e. DNA binding domain (DBD), oligomerization domain (OD), nuclear localization signal (NLS), nuclear export signal (NES) and AHA type activation domain. OsHsf entry LOC_Os06g226100 has the oligomerization domain but lacks the above other domains. Also, there are no ESTs or full-length cDNA noted for this entry in database. Expression profiling showed that 22 OsHsf genes are induced by high temperature. Induction of 10 and 14 OsHsf genes was also noted against low temperature stress and oxidative stress, respectively. All OsHsf genes induced by oxidative stress were also induced by high temperature. On the other hand, induction of 6 and 1 OsHsf genes was noted to be exclusive to high and low temperature stresses, respectively. Seven OsHsf genes showed induced expression in response to all the three stresses examined. While in silico promoter analysis showed that OsHsf genes contain upstream regulatory elements corresponding to different abiotic stresses, there was lack of correlation noted between the in silico profiling of the elements and their corresponding transcript expression patterns. Apart from stress inducibility, EST database suggests that various OsHsf genes are developmentally regulated in diverse tissue types.