3.3 Identification of transcription factor (TF) families
Blast2GO suite identified Gene Ontology (GO) terms and protein domain signatures from top 500 DEGs utilizing InterproScan (IPS) database. The analysis indicated that the top category was a protein kinase domain followed by MYB/SANT domain, AP2/ERF , NB-ARC , andbHLH domains (Figure S5). A total of 976 unigenes were identified as putative TFs and regulators from the transcriptome categorized into 72 transcription factor families, which are likely to have a role in red and blue light-mediated transcriptional regulation in various metabolic pathways. Among them, C2H2 was the most prominent TF family category with 117 unigenes followed by CCHC(Zn) (99 unigenes),RR-A type (42 unigenes), MYB-HB like (62 unigenes),bHLH (44 unigenes) and WD-40 like transcription factors (40 unigenes) (Figure S6). Some of the earlier identified TFs known to be involved in bilberry ripening (Nguyen et al., 2018), such asNAM (NAC family TFs) with 13 unigenes, WRKY TFs with 17 unigenes and MADS -like TFs with 13 unigenes, were identified as differentially expressed in response towards red and blue light treatment. Another class of TFs called AP2-EREBP (APETALA2/EF) belonging to ethylene hormone responsive transcription factor family, was also significantly expressed among the DEGs (38 unigenes).