Plant cis-regulatory sequences (CRSs) are essential for gene expression and transcriptional regulation in plants. With the rapid development of plant biotechnologies, such as transgenesis and gene editing tools, plant-derived CRSs have gradually replaced traditional CRSs, like the 35S promoter, to avoid some negative effects caused by exogenous DNA sequences. In this study, we provided a comprehensive analysis of the published genomic data of Andrographis paniculata and identified six candidate ApACRs. Based on the transient assays, two candidate CRSs (ApACR1 and ApACR2) demonstrated high transcriptional activities comparable to those of the 35S promoter in several plant species, in contrast to others with lower activities, suggesting their further potential applications in plant biotechnology and genetic engineering.

Background: Plantago asiatica (P. asiatica) is an important Chinese traditional medicinal plant of the family Plantaginaceae and widely used in pharmaceutical industries. TCP transcription factors play an important role in plant development, but a limited number of studies on this have been reported in P. asiatica.Methods: Since genome assembly was not available, in this study, we used the de novo transcriptome assembly method to genome-wide-characterize the TCP gene family in P. asiatica. Up to 70.7 M high-quality paired-end reads were generated after sequencing and a total of 12 TCP genes were cloned by the predicted bioinformatic results, which were named PaTCP1-12. Results: Phylogenetic tree, motif analysis and subcellular localization results revealed that these PaTCPs were conserved compared to those from the model plant, Arabidopsis. Expression analysis suggested that most of the TCPs were highly expressed in both the leaf and root, while PaTCP1, PaTCP6 and PaTCP9 could also be detected in the seed. Conclusions: Since seed characteristics are one of the main agronomical traits in P. asiatica, the finding of PaTCP1, PaTCP6 and PaTCP9 expression patterns in the stem suggested an important role for further plant improvement.

Chromatin accessibility is important for genome architecture and gene expression in plants. In this study, the ATAC-seq method was utilized to identify accessible chromatin regions (ACRs) across the chickpea (Cicer arietinum) genome, an important legume crop cultivated worldwide. A total of 11,555 ACRs were identified in the chickpea genome, enriched at gene transcription start sites (TSS) and positively correlated with gene expression. Furthermore, as expected, a number of known transcription factor (TF) binding motifs were enriched in these ACRs. Integrating histone modification data, ACRs were found to be closely associated with H3K27ac and H3K4me3 modifications to regulate gene expression. In addition, the gain and loss of ACRs have been demonstrated to have significant effects on the expression of homologous genes. Collectively, this study provides a comprehensive understanding of the genomic function of ACRs in chickpea.