CHARACTERIZATION OF ATP GENE IN Calotropis procera MITOCHONDRIAL GENOME

The drought-tolerant wild plant C. procera is important in medicine, industry and ornamental fields. Generally, its bark and leaves are used for many Folk medicine treatments. ATP4 (mitochondrion ATPase subunit 4), one of ATP gene family provides instructions for making transporter proteins called ATPases, which use energy from ATP molecule to move substances, such as fats, sugars, charged atoms or molecules (ions), and drugs, across the cell membranes. In this study, we uncovered and characterized ATP4 (ATP4, NCBI accession no. KP171515) gene in this medicinal plant from the de novo assembled transcriptome contigs of the high-throughput sequencing dataset. A number of GenBank accessions for ATP4 sequences were blasted with the recovered de novo assembled contigs. Homology modeling of the deduced amino acids was further carried out using Swiss-Model, accessible via the EXPASY. Superimposition of C. procera ATP4 full sequence model on Chain A, Subcomplex of the Stator of Bovine Mitochondrial ATP Synthase (PDB accession no. 2CLY_A) was constructed using RasMol and Deep-View programs. The functional domains of the novel ATP4 amino acids sequence were identified from the NCBI conserved domain data-base (CDD, accession no. cl21478) that provide insights into sequence structure/function relationships, as well as domain models imported from a number of external source databases (Pfam, SMART, COG, PRK, TIGRFAM).