Phylogenetic analysis against 22 referenced UGTs from Arabidopsis and maize clustered the putative UGTs into 15 major groups (A-O); J, K, and N were not represented, but the UGTs were distributed across all chromosomes except chromosome 04.
Most of the CDPK genes from monocots (rice and maize) clustered into one sub-branch, as did the CDPK genes from the eudicots (Arabidopsis, poplar and grape).
The populations from El Obeid (host: sorghum), Dirweesh (host: sorghum), and Kenya (host: maize) clustered in one group, while the population from Elkaraiba (host: sorghum) was in a distant branch of the same group.
First, rather than tightly clustering in a genic island like other maize gene clusters [ 22], the thirteen loci of the Meg family are spread over a genomic region of ~800 kb.
Using sequence similarity to Meg genes and to other genes flanking the maize Meg cluster, we identified regions in the maize, sorghum, and rice genomes that are homologous or homeologous to the 800-kb Meg-containing region.
The barley HvOS1 and HvOS2 putative proteins, and their putative cereal orthologues, namely, wheat TaAGL-33 and TaAGL-42, brachypodium Bradi2g59190 and Bradi2g59120, rice OsMADS65, and maize ZmB4FML1, cluster together forming a distinct subclass.
After discarded sorghum regions absent from both maize subgenomes presumably representing clusters of gene insertions into sorghum or regions without sufficient conservation of synteny to identify orthology 16 regions of 40 or more sorghum genes were identified that were orthologous to a only one syntenic region in maize (supplementary table S5, Supplementary Material online).
Those from Tandalti (host: pearl millet) and Agadi (host: maize) formed another cluster (Fig. 5).
Forty-three predicted MATE members found in the maize genome were clustered in two major groups, one of them comprising citrate transporters associated with Al tolerance in different plant species that included five maize MATEs (Additional file 5: Figure S2).
In maize, meiotic telomere clustering has been demonstrated to occur de novo on the NE during meiotic prophase I, and the temporal patterns are nearly identical to those in mammals [ 45, 51].
