Abstract
Endomycorrhizae have the ability to exploit organic sources while providing their host plant with nitrogen and phosphorus, but the mutualistic molecular mechanism by which this occurs is unclear. In a previous study, five uncharacterized root proteins were found to be significantly upregulated in endomyconlizacolonized sorghum, which showed an increase in biomass and element uptake. However, the functions of these proteins are unknown. Therefore, in the current study, the functions of these five proteins were explored using computational analysis. Since these root proteins were not identified in plant protein sequences, they were submitted to Blast to search for homologous fungal protein data. The possible functions of the resulting 406 homologous proteins were investigated by performing several analyses, namely, phylogenetic analysis, sequence similarity network (SSN) analysis, genome neighborhood network (GNN) analysis, and functional network identification. The results of analyzing the uncharacterized sorghum root proteins revealed three integial membrane proteins among them: an APC amino-acid permease, a transmembrane transporter activity protein, and an acid protease. These results emphasize the role of endomycorrhiza-plant interactions in increased root pemieability, resulting in the enhanced exchange of reciprocal resources in a symbiotic process.