Abstract
At DNA level, methylation is one of the most studied epigenetic marks and plays an important role in plant growth and development via regulating gene expression, integrity, and mobility of genome as well as transposons. The epigenetic studies especially the DNA methylation have been investigated only in a few members of the Solanaceae family like tomato and potato. So far, cytosine methylation landscape in Capsicum, a diploid, self-pollinating crop of the Solanaceae family grown worldwide for fresh and processed products, is far less documented. In our research study in the laboratory, we found the overall high cytosine methylation in Capsicum fruit as compared to other plants. The Capsicum fruit shows at an average 89.1% of CG, 84.85% of CHG, and 24.9% CHH cytosine methylation globally. The variation in genome size reflects the variations in the global cytosine methylation across different species. The Capsicum genome which is 3–4-fold larger than that of tomato and potato is found to have ~1.2–2.7-fold higher cytosine methylation at all methylation contexts. The abundance of repetitive elements (REs) generally affects the variations in genome size across species and generally has dense cytosine methylation. The intraspecific variations in cytosine methylation as well as the miRNA-regulated methylation are unexplored in Capsicum, which could provide plausible evolutionary relationship between different species of Solanaceae family. DNA methylation is considered as one of the requisites for various developmental and transcriptional gene expression regulation, while it is also important for reprogramming of various biological processes and transcriptional gene regulation by trimming down their methylation profiles. Therefore, the collaborative role of methylation and demethylation phenomenon in DNA results in the global dynamic nature of cytosine methylation.
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This work was supported by the financial grant from the University Grants Commission (UGC), India, in the form of University of Potential For Excellence II grant to Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, India.
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Rawoof, A., Ahmad, I., Ramchiary, N. (2019). Epigenome Landscape in Capsicum Genome. In: Ramchiary, N., Kole, C. (eds) The Capsicum Genome. Compendium of Plant Genomes. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97217-6_11
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