Computational analysis of heat stress in Plants

Global Warming is one of the challenges that we are facing in today’s era. The effect of global warming is not only limited to human beings but its effect can also be seen on plants. Increased temperature causes heat stress in plants and this ultimately decreases the quality and quantity of crops. The need of this hour is to develop crop plants with enhanced thermo tolerance. In this report we have used data mining techniques to show that heat stress is an important stress affecting the agricultural production. At the molecular level post translational modifications have been shown to be influenced in plants under heat stress. We have studied Palmitoylation, Sumoylation, S- Nitrosylation and Nitration in the plant gene sequences associated with heat stress and not associated with heat stress. We show that sumoylation is an important property which is possibly influenced in large number of proteins associated with heat stress in a wide variety of plants. This property can be used for identifying novel sequences associated with heat stress in plants.