Cloning and expression analysis of transcription factor AhWRI1s in peanut

Peanut is one of the widely cultivated oil and economic crops worldwide and has become a major source of oil and protein for humans due to its high oil and protein content. With the increasing global demand for vegetable oil, improving the fatty acid composition and increasing the lipid content of peanut seeds has become a top priority in peanut breeding. Transcriptional regulators can modulate the expression of a series of genes in metabolic pathways related to lipid synthesis, significantly affecting lipid synthesis and metabolism. In this study, two transcription factors, AhWRI1-1 and AhWRI1-2, were cloned from the leaves of Huayu 33. The ORF of AhWRI1-1 was 1101 bp, encoding 366 amino acids, and the ORF of AhWRI1-2 was 1128 bp, encoding 375 amino acids. Bioinformatics analysis revealed that both AhWRI1-1 and AhWRI1-2 contained two AP2/EREBP conserved domains. The expression patterns of AhWRI1-1 and AhWRI1-2 in different tissues were detected by qRT-PCR. The results showed that AhWRI1-1 had the highest expression in seeds, suggesting its involvement in the regulation of fatty acid synthesis and oil accumulation, while AhWRI1-2 had the highest expression in hypocotyls, indicating its role in hypocotyl development. Additionally, the differences in the responses of AhWRI1-1 and AhWRI1-2 to abiotic stresses suggested that these transcription factors may play different roles under such conditions. Transcriptional activation experiments in yeast showed that both AhWRI1-1 and AhWRI1-2 possess transcriptional activation activities. This study lays the foundation for future in-depth functional studies of AhWRI1-1 and AhWRI1-2.