Bioinformatics Analysis of ZmIMPα Gene and Its Expression Pattern under Salt Stress in Maize

Guo Zhaoyang; Yin Yuhang; Liu Yu; Gao Xuan; Song Xiyun; Zhao Mei'ai

doi:10.14083/j.issn.1001-4942.2025.02.001

Abstract：Importin α(IMPα)is an important transport protein for proteins and RNA in cytoplasm to en-ter nucleus and plays important roles in plants.In this study,IMPα genes of maize were identified and ana-lyzed by bioinformatics analysis,and then the relative expression level of ZmIMPα in different maize inbred lines under salt stress were detected by real-time fluorescence quantitative PCR,and its function was verified through constructing a prokaryotic overexpression Escherichia coli strain and analyzing its growth under salt stress.The results showed that a total of 15 transcripts of 7 IMPα genes were identified from maize with the CDS sequence as 297 to 625 aa,the molecular weight as 32.5 to 64.0 kDa and the isoelectric point as 3.95 to 7.27;they were all located in cytoplasm,and ten were also located in cell nucleus.The phylogenetic analysis showed that they could be divided into 3 subfamilies except Zm00001eb001150_T001,and they had higher similarity with those of Arabidopsis thaliana.Conserved domain analysis showed that the IMPα family belonged to the SRP1 superfamily.The promoter analysis showed that the IMPα genes of maize contained hormone re-sponse elements and abiotic stress-related response elements,which might play roles in plant growth and re-sponse to abiotic stresses.Under salt stress,the expression level of ZmIMPα increased significantly in salt-tol-erant material,and decreased significantly in salt-sensitive material.The prokaryotic expression analysis showed that the growth of the strain containing pET28a-ZmIMPα plasmid was inhibited compared with the no-load strain under 0.6 mol/L and 0.8 mol/L NaCl stress,and the degree of inhibition increased with the in-crease of NaCl concentration,suggesting that ZmIMPα might show a negative regulatory pattern under salt stress.The results of this study could provide a theoretical basis for further exploring the role of importin family genes in the stress resistance of maize.