Abstract
Objective: Using disease-resistant genes is the most effective strategy for protecting crops and ensuring agricultural production, or and protection against infections of different pathogens. Under biotic and abiotic stresses, NB-ARC proteins play a critical role in regulating several critical plant metabolic processes and pathways. Methods: NB-ARC identification and characterization in soybean are still in their infancy, even though R genes have been characterized by various major crop plants. NB-ARC encoding (R) genes in the soybean genome were identified and characterized in silico. Results: The 103 NB-ARC genes were computationally identified in the soybean genome, randomly distributed on all soybean chromosomes except 5, 10, and 17. Phylogenetic analysis classified the NB-ARC proteins into nine primary groups. However, synteny analysis results of NB-ARC genes of soybean found the best orthologous hit in the A. thaliana representing sequence conservation up to 80%. Soybean NB-ARC genes displayed a plurality of introns between one to seven among the family members. Although their genomic regions have different sizes, a relatively conserved genetic structure was observed within phylogenetic tree groups. Twenty different domains were kept in a group-specific manner, together with the presence of the NB-ARC signatory. Moreover, the transcriptome based-data expression analysis suggested that NB-ARC genes in between non-pathogens and pathogens after the inoculation of Fusarium oxysporum (biotic stress) in the soybean transcriptome, supporting the conjecture of NB-ARC genes have disease resistance functions in the soybean genome and revealing the potential involvement of these genes in the conserved pathways of the biotic-stress-response. Conclusion: This genome-wide in silico/ computational analysis will be used for accelerating NB-ARC members used for functional characterization, especially under biotic and abiotic stresses. (c) 2021 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of King Saud University. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).