Interactions among Plant Transcription Factors Regulating Expression of Stress-responsive Genes

Plants are simultaneously subjected to a variety of stress conditions in the field and are known to combat the hostile conditions by up/down-regulating number of genes. There exists a significant level of cross-talk between different stress responses in plants. In this study, we predict the interacting pairs of transcription factors that regulate the multiple abiotic stress-responsive genes in the plant Arabidopsis thaliana. We identified the interacting pair(s) of transcription factors (TFs) based on the spatial proximity of their binding sites. We also examined the interactions between the predicted pairs of TFs using molecular docking. Subsequent to docking, the best interaction pose was selected using our scoring scheme DockScore, which ranks the docked solutions based on several interface parameters and aims to find optimal interactions between proteins. We analyzed the selected docked pose for the interface residues and their conservation.