Genome-Wide Identification and Analysis of Phospholipase C Gene Family Reveals Orthologs, Co-Expression Networks, and Expression Profiling Under Abiotic Stress in Sorghum bicolor

Phospholipase C (PLC) is an essential enzyme involved in lipid signaling pathways crucial for regulating plant growth and responding to environmental stress. In sorghum, 11 PLC genes have been identified, comprising 6 <i>PI-PLCs</i> and 5 <i>NPCs</i>. Through phylogenetic and interspecies collinearity analyses, structural similarities between SbPLCs and ZmPLCs proteins have been observed, with a particularly strong collinearity between SbPLCs and OsPLCs. Promoter function analysis has shown that <i>SbPLCs</i> are significantly enriched under abiotic stress and hormonal stimuli, like ABA, jasmonic acid, drought, high temperature, and salt. Gene co-expression networks, constructed using a weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA), highlight distinct expression patterns of <i>SbPLC1</i>, <i>SbPLC3a</i>, and <i>SbPLC4</i> in response to abiotic stress, providing further insights into the expression patterns and interactions of <i>SbPLCs</i> under various environmental stimuli. qRT-PCR results reveal variations in expression levels among most <i>SbPLCs</i> members under different stress conditions (drought, NaCl, NaHCO₃), hormone treatments (ABA), and developmental stages, indicating both specific and overlapping expression patterns. This comprehensive analysis offers valuable insights into the roles of <i>SbPLCs</i> in sorghum, shedding light on their specific expression patterns, regulatory elements, and protein interactions across different environmental stimuli and developmental stages.