Genome-wide comparative analysis of flowering genes between Arabidopsis and mungbean

Mungbean is one of the major crops grown in South, East and Southeast Asia because of a high quality of amino acid profile; however, its asynchronous flowering time makes difficult to harvest at a time. Synchronization of flowering time is important to reduce labor costs for harvesting. With the availability of next generation sequencing data of mungbean, we approached a strategy of comparative genomics to identify mungbean homologous counterpart of A. thaliana genes that are known to be involved in flowering pathways, followed by a comparative soybean quantitative trait loci (QTL) analysis of the putative mungbean flowering-related genes. Co-localization of mungbean QTL associated with days to first flower day (FLD) was also identified using the EST-SSR markers from a previous study. Additionally, based on the mungbean transcriptome data with a distinct flowering stage of R2, FPKM (Fragments Per Kilobase per Million mapped reads) expression analysis of all the genes found in paralogous synteny blocks was conducted to examine expression patterns of the genes that have undergone a whole genome duplication event. Our results indicate that the paralogous flowering genes along with other genes within a same synteny block have evolved together at the macro-synteny scale. This study provides insights into mungbean flowering genes, in which they can be used as tools in order to improve flowering synchronization and to increase yield.