Identification of protein kinase SNF1 in CitEST

SnRKs (Sucrose non-fermenting-1 related kinases) is a family of protein kinases found in many crops, such as Arabidopsis, rice, sugarcane, tomato and several other plant species. This family of proteins is also present in other organisms like Saccharomyces cerevisiae (sucrose non-fermenting-1 - Snf1) and in mammals (AMP-activated protein kinases - AMPKs). There is evidence that SnRKs play an important role in plant responses to nutritional and environmental stresses and that SnRKs also play a major role in controlling key enzymes in the biosynthetic pathways of plants. In this work, we identified 18 contigs and two singletons encoding putative SnRKs in the CitEST database. All of them present highly conserved N-terminal catalytic domain, which is found in the SnRKs families of several plant species. Through comparison with known SnRKs, we were able to classify them into three subfamilies.