Genome-wide investigation and expression analysis of sweet cherry PavNAC gene family under different abiotic stress

The <i>NAC</i> gene family is an important transcription factor unique to plants, widely involved in plant growth, development, and response to different stress. The physicochemical properties, phylogenetics, chromosome localization, gene structure and motif, collinearity, and gene expression under stress of the <i>PavNAC</i> transcription factor family in sweet cherry were analyzed. The results showed that the whole genome sequence of sweet cherry contains 132 <i>PavNAC</i> transcription factor genes, which are unevenly distributed on 8 chromosomes and divided into 10 subfamilies. The protein length of <i>PavNAC</i> ranged from 152 to 755 amino acids, and the CDS length ranged from 459 to 2268. The gene structure showed that most <i>PavNAC</i> members contain 3 exons and 10 motifs. Collinearity analysis result showed that 54 <i>PavNAC</i> genes in sweet cherry have homologous genes in <i>Arabidopsis</i>. Transcriptome data of different development stages of 'Hong Deng' and 'Black Pearl' showed that <i>PavNAC42</i> and <i>PavNAC101</i> were specifically expressed in both varieties. Finally, expression of 15 <i>PavNAC</i> genes under different abiotic stress were analyzed by real-time PCR. The results showed that <i>PavNAC70</i>, <i>PavNAC9</i>, and <i>PavNAC10</i> were induced by low temperature. <i>PavNAC70</i> and <i>PavNAC81</i> were both induced by salt and PEG stresses. The study laid the foundation for subsequent molecular breeding and further exploration of the function of <i>PavNAC</i> genes in sweet cherry.