Abstract
Background WRKY transcription factor is a kind of transcription factor which plays an important role in plant response to biotic, abiotic stress, plant growth and development. However, little information was available about the WRKY genes in jute ( Corchorus capsularis ).Results In the present study, 43 jute WRKY (CcWRKY) genes were identified by using Pfam database domain search and BLAST homology alignment based on the transcriptome data of jute. And the gene structure, phylogeny, conserved domain and three-dimensional structure of protein were also analyzed by GSDS2.0, MEGA7.0, DNAMAN5.0, WebLogo 3 and SWISS-MODEL bioinformatics tools. According to the WRKY conserved domain features and the evolution analysis with Arabidopsis thaliana , 43 members were divided into three classes: I, II and III containing 9, 28, 6 members, respectively. According to the evolutionary relationship, class II further divided into five subclasses: II-a (2), II-b (7), II-c (7), II-d (6) and II-e (6). Genetic structure analysis showed that exon and intron number of CcWRKY genes had high variability (3-11 exons), even within the same subgroup. Most of the CcWRKY genes were expressed in different tissues, but they were mainly expressed in stem bark and stem stick. After GA 3 stress, the expression of most WRKY genes in GA 3 -sensitive variety "Aidianyehuangma" was significantly different from that of normal variety "Huangma 179". These results indicated that CcWRKY genes play an important role in gibberellin biosynthesis pathway and fiber development.Conclusions CcWRKY proteins are highly conserved, the length of the gene sequence and the number of introns varied widely, all WRKY genes showed a variety of expression patterns in different tissues, most of the WRKY genes responded to GA 3 stress, which play an important role in gibberellin biosynthesis pathway and bast fiber development.