3.3 Regulatory genes evolution of the GSH metabolic pathway inG. hirsutum
In order to investigate the regulatory mechanisms of the
duplicated GSH metabolic pathway in more detail, we constructed several
co-expression networks based on 33 stress-related transcriptome data
using the first 25,000 genes as targets (Fig. S1A). Cluster analysis
was performed on the 33 transcriptome data to obtain the
correlation coefficients based on the expression level of each gene.After calculating the weight values, the genes with high
correlation were assigned to the same module, and the modules with
similar expression were merged by dynamic tree-cut method (Fig.
S1B). Then, we used the structural genes in the GSH pathway as the
target genes to screen out all potential regulatory genes from the
co-expression networks. Consequently, we found that under all stress
conditions, only 21 structural genes (Table S5) appeared in these
co-expression networks, while 98 regulatory genes were predicated to be
correlated with the 21 genes ( Fig. S2, Table S5) .These regulatory genes were categorized into 13 gene families.
Relatively abundant regulatory genes were identified from theWRKY (25), C2H2 (14), HSF (12), and ERF (10) gene
families. In contrast, only two regulators were detected in four
(B3, HD-Zip, NF-X1, and RAV) gene
families (Fig. S3, Table S5).