Repository of DUTH

Plant genes responsible for drought resistance (Bachelor thesis)

Αρβανιτάκης, Βασίλειος/ Arvanitakis, Vasileios

The focal point of this project is the annotation of phylogenetic relations between variants of the same genes that are critical for survival of plants under drought conditions across different types of plant organisms. To this end, five key genes that are crucial for maintaining homeostasis under abiotic drought stress were first selected, with their functions ranging from the regulation of phytohormonal levels, to aiding in growth, specialization, or restoration of cells. Subsequently, five organisms were chosen, the main caveat being the representation of as genetically and geographically diverse categories of plants as possible. The main goal of the study is to draw conclusions from the five created phylogenetic trees regarding the evolutionary trajectory, scale of gene expression, and utility of the same genes in different plants. For the creation and organization of the phylogenetic trees, two modern bioinformatics tools "BioEdit" and "MEGAX" were utilized, in combination with the database collection "NCBI" to retrieve and download sequences through BLAST. The analysis of the phylogenetic trees led to conjectures about how, at the genetic level, notably distant plant organisms cope with and outlast aridity.