In Silico Studies of C3 Metabolic Pathway Proteins of Wheat (Triticum aestivum)

Photosynthesis is essential for plant productivity and critical for plant growth. More than 90% of plants have a C3 metabolic pathway primarily for carbon assimilation. Improving crop yields for food and fuel is a major challenge for plant biology. To enhance the production of wheat there is need to adopt the strategies that can create the change in plants at the molecular level. During the study we have employed computational bioinformatics and interactomics analysis of C3 metabolic pathway proteins in wheat. The three-dimensional protein modeling provided insight into molecular mechanism and enhanced understanding of physiological processes and biological systems. Therefore in our study, initially we constructed models for nine proteins involving C3 metabolic pathway, as these are not determined through wet lab experiment (NMR, X-ray Crystallography) and not available in RCSB Protein Data Bank and UniProt KB. On the basis of docking interaction analysis, we proposed the schematic diagram of C3 metabolic pathway. Accordingly, there also exist vice versa interactions between 3PGK and Rbcl. Future site and directed mutagenesis experiments in C3 plants could be designed on the basis of our findings to confirm the predicted protein interactions.