Comparative analysis of plant MKK gene family reveals novel expansion mechanism of the members and sheds new light on functional conservation

Background: Mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) cascades play critical functions in almost every aspect of plant growth and development, which regulates many physiological and biochemical processes. As a middle nodal point of the MAPK cascades, although evolutionary analysis of MKK from individual plant families had some reports, their evolutionary history in entire plants is still not clear. Results: To better understand the evolution and function of plant MKKs, we performed systematical molecular evolutionary analysis of the MAPKK gene family and also surveyed their gene organizations, sequence features and expression patterns in different subfamilies. Phylogenetic analysis showed that plant MAPKK fall into five different groups (Group A–E). Majority orthology groups seemed to be a single or low-copy genes in all plant species analyzed in Group B, C and D, whereas group A MKKs undergo several duplication events, generating multiple gene copies. Further analysis showed that these duplication events were on account of whole genome duplications (WGDs) in plants and the duplicate genes maybe have undergone functional divergence. We also found that group E MKKs had mutation with one change of serine or theronine might lead to inactivity originated through the ancient tandem duplicates in monocots. Moreover, we also identified MKK3 integrated NTF2 domain that might have gradually lost the cytoplasmic-nuclear trafficking activity, which suggests that they may involve with the gene function more and more sophistication in the evolutionary process. Moreover, expression analyses indicated that plant MKK genes play probable roles in UV-B signaling. Conclusion: In general, ancient gene and genome duplications are significantly conducive to the expansion of the plant MKK gene family. Our study reveals two distinct evolutionary patterns for plant MKK proteins and sheds new light on the functional evolution of this gene family.

MAPK kinase; Gene duplication; Evolution; Gene expression; NTF2 domain; Docking site

Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s12864-018-4793-8) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

Plants have evolved intricate mechanisms to respond various perturbations or stresses of external environment to maintain normal growth and development. Plants cannot move its position to avoid the adverse environments and can only adapt to the abiotic or biotic stresses in situ. Therefore, plants have developed a set of precise regulatory mechanisms to perceive the cues from environment, to transduce and amplify the signal, and to respond to stress at the molecular, cellular and physiological levels [[1] ]. Protein modification is a primary mode of signal transduction such as phosphorylation. These compounds execute diverse signaling cascades in post-translational level by means of catalyzing the addition of phosphate groups to serine and threonine/tyrosine residues in their target proteins, which switch downstream stress-responsive genes on or off in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells [[2] ]. A tripartite mitogen-activated protein kinase (MAPK) signaling cascade is sophisticated multienzyme complexes that are highly conserved in evolution and fundamental signaling transduction pathways that play important roles in stress resistance, hormonal responses and developmental regulation [[3] –[5] ]. A canonical MAPK cascade is composed of three continuously acting protein kinases. The MAPKK kinase (MAPKKK or MEKK) phosphorylates and activates the MAPK kinase (MAPKK, MEK or MKK) on the S/T-X3–5-S/T motif which is located in their phosphorylation region. Subsequently, the activated MKK can phosphorylate MAPK (also called MPK) at their threonine and tyrosine (TXY) residues located in the MAPK activation loop [[3] , [6] ]. Moreover, scaffold proteins, shared docking domains and adaptor or anchoring proteins can mediate the formation and integrity of a specific MAPK cascade [[7] –[9] ]. Numerous reports indicated that the MAPK cascades were connected with signaling pathways activated by many critical environmental factors, such as salinity, low temperature, drought, heavy metals, high pH, biotic stresses and plant hormone responses [[5] , [10] ].

With the completion of the genome sequence in a variety of plants, many members of MAPK cascades have been annotated. MAPK protein was originally identified in the model plant Arabidopsis thaliana. Subsequent comprehensive bioinformatics analyses of these protein families have identified in plant genomes, including A. thaliana [[11] ], Oryza sativa [[12] ], Brassica napus [[13] ], apple [[14] ], Brachypodium distachyon [[15] ], and so on. However, these researches have been limited to one or a few plant with no change in this status. To date, knowledge about the function of MAPK cascade, especially MKKs that are the middle nodal point of the MAPK cascade, is rather limited in several species, including Arabidopsis. MKKs containing the least members which is only half of MAPKs may be able to activate more than one MAPK protein which indicates a large number of combinatorial possibilities to form specific MAPK cascade [[16] ]. The 10 MKKs encoded in the Arabidopsis genome, among which one (MKK10) have one mutation in conserved S/T-X5-S/T motif, can be classified into four groups (A to D) based on their evolutionary relationship. MKK1 and MKK2 which belongs to group A in Arabidopsis can activate downstream MPK4 in responses to cold and salinity, and also mediate innate immunity responses [[17] ]. Moreover, MKK1 also mediates H2O2 metabolism via MPK6-coupled signaling in Arabidopsis [[18] ]. MKK6 was identified to activate MPK13 in mutant yeasts [[19] ] and NQK1 which is an MKK6 ortholog in tobacco was involved in the formation of the cell plate at the late M-phase of cytokinesis [[20] ]. MKK3, the only member of group B MKK, which has a nuclear transfer factor 2 (NTF2) domain in their 3′ extension C- terminus region that mediates nuclear import of RanGDP [[21] ], plays a pivotal role in jasmonate (JA)-mediated signal transduction pathway [[22] ] and blue light-mediated signaling [[23] ]. MKK4/5, group C MKK gene members, were revealed to regulate in stress responses [[24] ] and ABA responses [[25] ]. With the exception of MKK7 and MKK9, which were also reported be related to polar auxin transport and ethylene signaling pathways, respectively [[26] , [27] ], there is little information about the function of other group D MKKs, which may due to the low-level transcripts of them. Previously, it has been suggested that MKK10 had not biologically function because of the mutation in active site. However, recent report suggested that OsMKK10–2 plays a crucial role in salicylic-acid (SA) signal-mediated pathogen defense response [[28] ].

So far, evolutionary history studies of MAPK cascades in plants have executed by using a limited number of plants species. Some studies used MAPK sequences from several representative plants had revealed a phylogeny covering > 800 million years of evolution [[29] ] and showed novel activation loop variants [[30] ]. Gene duplication is a basic source of new genes in evolution, providing novel opportunities for evolutionary success [[31] ], while whole genome duplications (WGDs) is one of the important evolutionary feature. Evidence for WGDs has been detected at least one time in most plant taxa, while it has at least two rounds of WGDs that are assumed to have place approximately 60–70 and 23–43 Myr ago in A. thaliana [[32] , [33] ]. The results of WGDs are gene amplification double of all genes [[31] , [32] ]. Ever since a WGD event, plants take up removing most redundant gene copies in a long evolutionary process, but some duplicated copies are retained depending on their environmental adaptation [[32] , [34] ], which is the cause of varying numbers of multigene family members between plant species.

In contrast to MAPKs, MKK's evolutionary across different plant species has not been reported. Fortunately, the sequence availability of plant genomes allowed us to investigate the evolutionary history of MKKs from different plant species. In this study, we have identified MAPKK genes, examined their structural information, and performed phylogenetic analyses from major plant lineages. Our analyses identify a comprehensive overview of the phylogenetics and showed that two distinct evolutionary patterns in different MKK groups, as well as functional evolution of MKK3 have distinct difference compared to those of other groups. Expression patterns of these genes are analyzed in five taxa with various tissues and treatments, and the potential function of these genes is discussed.

In order to investigate the diversity and evolution of MAPKK protein architectures across plants, identification of the MAPKK gene family was performed from 51 genome publicly available plants that contained the maximum number of species across the plant lineages starting from the unicellular eukaryote alga to the angiosperm A. thaliana (Table [1] ). We found that the numbers of MAPKKs varied from species to species across the entire plant kingdom. 365 non-redundant MKK sequences were retrieved in total (Table [1] , Additional file 1). The tetraploid soybean genome contained the largest number MAPKK genes, whereas the lower alga plant Volvox carteri only contained one. In addition, B. distachyon (12), Capsella rubella (11), Gossypium raimondii (11), Manihot esculenta (11), Populus trichocarpa (11) and Setaria italic (12) contained higher number of MKKs (Table [1] , Additional file 1).

Table 1 Table representing genome size of different plant species and number of MAPKK genes present per genome (species)

*Database websites: PLAZA, http://bioinformatics.psb.ugent.be/plaza/; NCBI, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/; Phytozome, https://phytozome.jgi.doe.gov/pz/; Pepper Genome Database, http://peppersequence.genomics.cn/page/species/index.jsp; Jatropha Genome Database, http://www.kazusa.or.jp/jatropha/; Cucurbit Genomics Database, http://cucurbitgenomics.org/; BRAD, http://brassicadb.org/brad/index.php; Kiwifruit genome Database, http://bioinfo.bti.cornell.edu/cgi-bin/kiwi/home.cgi; Eggplant Genome DataBase, http://eggplant.kazusa.or.jp/; Coffee Genome Hub, http://coffee-genome.org/; Carnation DB, http://carnation.kazusa.or.jp/; Spruce genome project, http://congenie.org/citation; SGD, http://www.yeastgenome.org/; UCSC Human Gene, http://genome.ucsc.edu/; PomBase, http://www.pombase.org/

In order to elucidate the evolution history of plant MAPKK proteins, comprehensive analyzing the phylogeny of all identified 365 protein sequences from 51 sequenced plant species to date plus the MKKs of Homo sapiens and two yeasts were performed using maximum likelihood (ML) methods. According to phylogenetic analyses and subcellular localization prediction results, the plant MAPKKs can be divided into five main clades and designated as A, B, C, D and E, respectively (Fig. 1; Additional file 1), which is inconsistent with what was reported for Arabidopsis and rice MKKs. The group A, B and C contains MKK1/2/6, MKK3 and MKK4/5, respectively. It is noteworthy that the MKK7/8/9/10 sequences were previously reported to belong to group D, whereas our results suggested that these subfamilies should be divided into group D (MKK7/8/9; OG5_150257) and E (MKK10; OG5_211998) in the study according to phylogenetic analyses with the addition of the Orthomcl analyses (Additional file 2). Moreover, six MKKs of lower algae plants including CrMKK2, MpMKK6, OlMKK6, PtiMKK1, SjMKK1 and VcMKK6 with human and yeasts plus group B MKKs were on the same evolutionary branch, suggested that ancient MKKs have existed before the split of animal and plant (Fig. 1). Although the six algae MKKs were not on the same evolutionary branch with the group A MKKs, they were highly homologous with their corresponding Arabidopsis MKKs. So, we still named them using the orthologous based on the names of Arabidopsis, such as CrMAPKK2. We defined 31 (6, 5, 7, 7 and 6) orthology groups in the five subfamilies (group A, B, C, D and E), respectively. Interestingly, 2 groups (A and B) had genes start from chlorophytes, indicating that more than one MAPKK gene might have occurred prior to the split of green algae and land plants. Nevertheless, group C and D had genes from gymnospermae and moss, respectively. In group D, with members from land plants including mosses, ferns, gymnosperms and eudicots, whereas without monocots, which suggested that it was lost the divergence between monocots and dicots. While it only contained members of group C in gymnosperms and angiosperms, implying that they originated in the common ancestor of spermophyte. Furthermore, most orthology groups in each species maintained single copy genes in group B MKKs.

To get a better overview of the characteristics of different plant MAPKKs, we further analyzed their sequences features. As expected, our motif organization analyses using InterProScan database revealed that putative plant MKK proteins contained common motifs in the same group, suggestive of functional similarities within each group. As illustrated in Fig. 2a, all of groups contain ATP binding site (IPR017441), protein kinase domain (IPR002290) and active site (IPR008271). Interestingly, group B MKKs have domain of Nuclear transport factor 2 (NTF2; IPR018222) near the carboxyl terminus, which is involved in the nuclear import of cargo proteins. These data provided us with clues for potential function of MKK proteins, including the idea that group B (MKK3) protein might participate in cytoplasmic-nuclear trafficking.

In order to understand the possible gene structural relationship among MKK orthologues and paralogues, we also analyzed the exon/intron organizations of different MAPKK genes using GSDS software. Within each group, most members displayed a similar exon/intron organization in the aspect of intron number, exon length, and intron phase. Notably, more similarities were observed in conserved regions such as protein kinase domain and active site (Fig. 2a). The numbers of intron also varied from 0 to 16 for another among different groups with wide divergence (Fig. 2a). Group A MKKs possesses introns ranged from 4 (DcMAPKK6–2 and PaMAPKK6–2) to 14 (AtrMAPKK2) and dominated with 7 (60%), while the numbers of intron in group B MKKs ranged from 2 (PaMAPKK3) to 16 (AtrMAPKK3) and 8 occupied the main points (68%; Additional files 1 and 3). Remarkably, most groups C, D and E MKKs contain intronless (Fig. 2a, Additional files 1 and 3).

Next, we further examined the molecular weights (Mw) and isoelectric point (pI) of different MAPKK proteins using the online version of Compute pI/Mw tool. The Mw of MAPKK proteins varied from 11.276 (FvMKK8) to 146.588 (TcMKK2) kDa and the pI varied from 5.06 (ZmMKK3–2) to 10.15 (VvMKK5) (Additional file 4). The pI of groups D and E MKKs were in the basic ranges, while those of group A and group B MKKs were ranges from acidic to slightly acidic and group C MKKs were resided within slight alkaline. The average amino acid composition of MAPKK proteins were ranges from 0.85 (tryptophan) to 10.38 (leucine) (Additional file 5). Remarkably, the average abundance of the most important amino acids serine and threonine (S/T-X5-S/T) which were involved in the phosphorylation function of MKKs were 8.70 and 4.16, respectively. In addition, the average abundance of the hydrophobic amino acids in MAPKKs were relatively higher than ones of other amino acids such as alanine (6.51), isoleucine (5.85), leucine (10.38), proline (6.35) and valine (6.35) (Additional file 5).

The formerly studies have identified several consensus sequences that is associated with the roles of structure or function, including the S/T-X5-S/T motif in the activation loop [[24] ], the docking site (K/R2-3X1–5L/IXL/I) in N-terminal domain [[35] , [36] ], the GxGxxGxV motif in the nucleotide binding domain (NB domain) and HK-X6-ALK motif in the ATP binding site [[37] ], and D(I/L/V)K motif in active site [[38] ]. Specifically, the serine or threonine in S/T-X5-S/T motif as the phosphorylation site play pivotal role in signal transduction pathway. In order to further identify consensus sequences that might be characteristic of phylogenetic group, we then performed sequence logos motif analyses using WebLogo 3 online tool for each group as an illustration of the sequences of ATP binding site and phosphorylation site of the protein kinase domain (Fig. 2b; Additional file 6). For examples, Fig. 2b showed the sequence information of active site D(I/L/V)K motif and phosphorylation site S/T-X5-S/T motif from each group. The stars indicated residues were important to the function of MAPKK. In all groups, the active site D(I/L/V)K motif were highly conserved despite occasional variations which contained novel active site, for instance, DFK (MdMAPKK2 and FvMAPKK1) or DMK (BvMAPKK6), which suggested that most MAPKK have the kinase activity. Furthermore, we observed an atypical phosphorylation site S/T-X5-S/T motif in group E MAPKK proteins, suggesting that these MAPKK may not have biologically function because the prior viewpoint that a mutation resulting in a change of serine or theronine led to the abolishment of kinase activity (Fig. 2c; [[10] , [37] ]). Hence, most group E MAPKKs (MKK10) maybe constitute a new group of inactive MAPKKs, although experimental tests for kinase activity need to be further validated. It was noteworthy that group E MAPKKs only existed in angiosperm plants, especially in monocots that have obviously gene expansion. In addition, plant MKKs posseed a highly conserved N-terminal extension which displayed a assumed MAPK docking site (D-site) K/R-K/R-K/RX(1–5)L/I-X-L/I [[39] ]. During MAPK signaling, the existence of short D-site that is used in common complementary region for recognition on the MAPK promotes the ability of MKKs to recognize their cognate MAPKs. The MKKs contained group specific conserved docking-sites, K/R-K-K-X1–5-L-K-L/V (group A), L-K/R-K-K-L-X-P-L (group B), R-X-R-R/K-R-X2-L-X-L-X-L (group C), R-X-R-R-X1–3-L-X-L (group D) and R-X-R-R-X1–4-L-X-L/I (group E), respectively (Additional file 7). The presence of group specific D-sites in MAPKKs suggested that different MAPKK targets were group specific in spite of those of group D and E MKKs had unusual similarity that might be involved in the more close relationship of their evolution. So we can obtain the consequence that evolution of different MAPKKs were orthologous based on group specific.

The phylogenetic analyses showed that 125, 53, 70, 75 and 42 MAPKKs fall into group A, B, C, D, and E, respectively (Fig. 3). In non-seed plants, only nineteenth total MKK genes were identified, including three in S. moellendorffii and seven in P. patens, others in six different algae. In flower plants, the five MKK gene subfamilies were found in most species, except B. oleracea, F. vesca and S. bicolor, in which group B MKK genes were not detected, while group C MKK genes were not detected in E. grandis and F. vesca. The incomplete annotation of the genome sequence may be the reason for generating the result that group B or C MKK genes in this species has not discovered, because all other angiosperms have these genes. Except for MKK10 (group E) was only gathered in the angiosperm plants, the remaining MAPKKs were found in most species we surveyed. Our analyses showed that the canonical group D MKKs were absence in monocots, whereas the atypical MAPKK (group E) existed in both monocots and dicots. It was noteworthy that the number of group specific members in dicots is restricted to 0–2 genes, while monocots had strikingly large numbers, which might be associated with the WGDs of plant species in evolutionary process (Fig. 3).

Throughout the 51 complete genome sequences of plant species, the MKK gene numbers were greatly variable, ranging from one in the green alga O. lucimarinus, P. tricornutum and V. carteri to 14 copies in B. rapa and G. max (Table [1] ; Fig. 3). In many plant lineages, the increase in MAPKK proteins was involved in polyploidy or ancient polyploidization events (Fig. 3; [[33] ]). For instance, there were 14 MKK genes in recently duplicated G. max genomes in which two rounds of WGDs have occurred. Similarly, the increase to identify the number of MAPKK genes in grasses was also probably attributable to three ancient polyploidization events in their evolutionary history [[33] ]. A remarkable exception was maize (Zea mays), which possessed only 8 MAPKK proteins in spite of WGDs event has occurred. Nevertheless, these events were likely earlier resulting in loss of more duplicated genes (Fig. 3). An abnormally low number of MKK genes were identified in eggplant (S. melongena, 4 MKK genes) for which we can,t find explicit explanation. Further analysis showed that the copy number variation in plant species was mainly attributable to the difference in group A MKKs (Fig. 3), while the copy numbers were almost constant in other groups. For instance, only one copy was detected in most plants in group B and E MKKs (Fig. 3).

The genetic distance between groups D and C MKKs was 0.924, which was the lowest than other counterparts, indicated that there were higher sequence similarity between the group D and C MKKs (Table [2] ), which was consistent with their evolutionary history and Orthomcl analysis (Additional file 2). While group B MKKs showed the highest genetic distance to group E than to other groups, indicating that group B MKKs were less similar with group E than other MKKs in sequence level. On the contrary, the genetic distance between each group had not significant difference, indicating that the sequence divergence between each group MKKs were not significant. In addition, the average overall mean distance of MAPKK was 1.109 (standard error 0.0602).

Table 2 Genetic distance between different groups of MAPKKs calculated based on the amino acid sequences with the Jones–Taylor–Thornton (JTT) model

To elucidate the evolutionary basis of functional diversification of each group MKKs, we have comprehensively evaluated the nonsynonymous-to-synonymous rates ratio (ώ = dN/dS) (Table [3] ) under different codon substitution-based evolutionary models. The mean ώ values were equally low for group B (ώ = 0.173) and group A (ώ = 0.228) MKKs, reflecting strong purify selection during the two groups MKK evolution. However, the mean ώ values of groups C, D and E MKKs were greater than 1, suggesting that the MKK genes are positive selection during the evolution process. Molecular evolutionary analysis revealed that group E and E☆ MKKs had roughly the same ώ values in spite of removing those of eudicots, indicating that positive selection were contributed by monocots during group E MKK evolution, while group A and B MKKs showed opposite results (Table [3] ). Moreover, in order to evaluate the difference between whole sequences and functional motifs, we also investigated the ώ values using the motif sequences (Additional file 8) under different codon substitution-based evolutionary models. The mean ώ values were equally low for all group MKKs when we used the sequences of D(I/L/V)K motif including S/T-X5-S/T motif, reflecting strong purify selection and indicating that D(I/L/V)K motif and S/T-X5-S/T motif are very conserved during the all group MKK evolution process (Additional file 8). Interestingly, except group C MKKs, it had similar results in the analyses of D-site or NB domain and ATP binding site (Additional file 8). In all, molecular evolutionary analyses using the motif sequences revealed that the difference of ώ values in different group MKKs were contributed by the sequences removing those of motifs which indicated that plant MKKs were very conserved, especially their functional domains.

Table 3 Molecular evolutionary analysis of the MAPKK genes using their whole cDNA sequences

N, number of sequences; Ka, the number of nonsynonymous substitutions per nonsynonymous site; Ks, the number of synonymous substitutions per synonymous site; ώ, Ka/Ks. ☆ Sequences from dicots were excluded. *Sequences from monocots were excluded

The major force of the evolution of different species comes from gene duplication, which causes the gene to generate the gene families. In order to further understand the duplication and evolution events of the MAPKK genes, we also investigated the duplicated genes in plant genome from each orthology group (Additional file 9). The amount of duplicated genes represents the sizes of gene families, which are known as paralogs. Compared with the species with non duplicated genomes, the duplicated genome plants are more likely lead to duplicated MAPKK genes. Thus G. max, B. rapa and B. distachyon possess more duplicated genes. To further examine the evolution and duplication events of the group A MAPKK genes, we reconstructed phylogenetic trees using MEGA 6.0 with additional sequences from other plants. As shown in Fig. 3, all six representative green algae we surveyed contain one or two copy, but terrestrial plants such as moss P. patens have three or more copies, suggested that duplications likely took place after green algae moving towards land. As described above, group A MKK genes have more copies than other groups (Fig. 3). So, group A MKK genes can be further divided into six groups based on the phylogenetic relationship in land plants, namely subgroup A1, A2, A3, A4, A5 and A6 (Additional file 10). Of these six groups, subgroup A6 contained genes in moss, whereas subgroup A3 and A4 contained genes from monocots, and subgroup A1, A2 and A5 from eudicots. Within the subgroup A2-A5 clades, there were several independent duplications in grasses and dicots, respectively, indicating that the ancestor of corresponding lineage may have happened to the duplication events (Additional file 10).

To explore the reason of these duplication events, we searched for the genomic regions containing the MAPKK genes which are possible synteny. Most duplicate gene pairs occurred in syntenic genomic regions, suggesting that these multiple gene copies were caused by whole genome or segmental duplications (Fig. 4; Additional files 11 and 12). Particularly, the duplication events of group A MKK1, MKK2 and MKK6 took place in the common ancestor of core eudicots corresponding with the γ WGD (Fig. 4; [[40] ]). The two duplications of group A MKKs in Brassicaceae were involved in the α/β WGDs within the Brassicaceae lineage (Additional file 11; [[40] ]). With the studies on the WGD events for many species were previously carried out, we collected these data and their paleopolyploidy histories (Fig. 3). We then assessed the duplication events to the influence of the size in group A MAPKKs. The comparison implied that the WGDs might be conducive to the expansion of the orthology groups from some species. In order to further confirm the roles of genome duplication to the gene family expansion, we carried out the co-relationship analysis between rounds of genome duplication about MAPKK genes. The correlation coefficient was calculated as 0.549 (P < 0.01) for the group A MAPKKs. The results suggested that the WGD significantly contributed to the gene expansion for group A MKKs.

As mentioned above, group E MKK genes have a part mutation in the phosphorylation site S/T-X5-S/T motif from angiosperms. In angiosperm plants, group E MKKs can be further divided into six subgroups, namely subgroup E1-E6 (Additional file 13). Of these six subgroups, subgroup E1-E3 and E4-E6 contained genes from eudicots and monocots, respectively. Moreover, group D MKKs which was from land plants had not contain genes in monocots lineage. Group E MKKs displayed a conserved evolutionary pattern in eudicots with one gene copy, which was consistent with the state that these genes have a part of mutation in key active site. While the number of MKK genes in monocots prominently increased large members to 2–5 copies. Further syntenic analyses revealed that the monocots MKK10 multiple gene copies were caused by tandem duplication in the ancestor of corresponding lineage (Fig. 5; Additional file 14). The members of these duplications were often in the same orthology groups [[41] ]. These duplicated genes were still in tandem in three species we analyzed and they were even multiplied during the segmental duplications of B. distachyon, S. italica and S. bicolor. Between the two MKK members, an Exportin-2 gene was often found (Fig. 5). These results suggested that the tandem MKK10 gene cluster in Poaceae originated in the common ancestral genomic contexts that result in modern monocot MKK genes.

Except group A and E MKKs, we also analyzed the phylogeny of other groups MKKs, respectively (Additional files 15, 16 and 17). Group C MKKs contained genes from seed plants, whereas group B MKKs contained genes from green plants. Group B MKKs showed one or low gene copy in all species that was a conserved evolutionary pattern. As a result, we can speculate that group B MKKs might have conserved and ancient functions that descended from the same ancestor of green plants. Even so, some recent duplication events also occurred. Within the group C and D MKKs, there was also one duplication event in Brassicaceae lineage (Additional files 16 and 17). Deeper syntenic analyses indicated that the group C MKK gene copies in Brassicaceae arise from WGD in the ancestor of this family (Additional file 18), while group D MKKs in Brassicaceae maybe contributed by segmental duplications or other forms.

A previous study showed that MKK8 and MKK10 have not expressed in shoot apices (including flower buds), mesophyll cells, mature leaves [[26] ] and flowers (including developing young siliques) [[42] ]. Based on the expression data of Arabidopsis from PLEXdb (AT40), we found that all Arabidopsis MKK genes are expressed (Fig. 6a). Except AtMKK8, most MKK genes have transcribed in the flowering stage. With the exception of MKK10, the Arabidopsis MKKs have a consensus S/T-X5-S/T in their activation domain. Even MKK10 have an atypical S/T-X5-S/T motif show detectable expression, indicating that they possibly have a new function other than becoming silenced. It is interesting that the expression of AtMKK10 is much higher in pollen compared with other tissues. Arabidopsis MKKs genetically exhibit the crosstalk in a variety of signaling pathways, therefore, a single mkk mutant under normal growth conditions is very difficult to obtain a specific phenotype [[43] ]. A previous study showed that the ap1–15, ap2–6, ap3–6, ag-12, clv3–7, lfy-12 and ufo-1 mutants involve with flower development, whereas AtMKK10 was down regulated in these mutants (Fig. 6b), consistent with their expression in the flower. CLV has a potential role in the regulation of meristem size and has little expressed in the center of the meristem [[44] , [45] ]. The bam (CLV homologs) mutant exhibited rather weak phenotypes and regulated the male gametophyte development, leading to almost completely sterile plants [[45] ]. Therefore, AtMKK10 which is regulated by CLV proteins may participate in the process of pollen development (Fig. 6c).

In rice, all except OsMKK10–1 and OsMKK10–3 are expressed in four reproductive stages from the microarray data (Additional file 19). Moreover, all maize and poplar MKK genes are expressed in different tissues (Additional file 19). However, the transcriptional levels in PtMKKs have a great difference, while maize is not obvious (Additional file 19). To further validate the transcripts of B. distachyon MKK genes in different tissues, we tested five different tissues that were a part of Bd21 seedling, root, leaf, stem and young caryopsis, to analyze the tissue specific expression patterns of MKK genes (Additional file 20). The results revealed that all except BdMKK10–4 are expressed in five different tissues and BdMKK6 and BdMKK10–2 have higher transcriptional levels in young caryopsis than other tissues (Additional file 20). It is interesting that previous study show that MKK10 may not be biologically functional on account of the lack part of the phosphorylation site, but OsMKK10–2 can mediate the response to pathogen defense. Not as expected, MPK6 can be phosphorylated by OsMKK10–2 which have the kinase activity [[28] ]. Moreover, we surveyed the gene expression of MKK under abiotic stresses that public microarray data of Arabidopsis under wound, drought, genotoxic, cold, osmotic, high-salinity, heat, oxidative and UV-B treatment were collected (Fig. 6d). Many plant MKK genes are up-regulated upon UV-B treatment, including AtMKK4 and AtMKK5. These results indicated that plant MKK genes may be involved in UV-B related signaling. To validate the expression profile of plant MKK genes in UV-B signaling, we performed the RT-qPCR experiments on RNA collected from different time points of B. distachyon plants under UV-B treatments. The results revealed that many MKK genes are up-regulated upon UV-B treatment, including BdMKK4 and BdMKK10–5, especially BdMKK10–5 originally have low-level transcripts in B. distachyon tissue (Additional file 20). These results indicated that BdMKK genes maybe also respond the UV-B stress. In a word, we can speculate that plant MKK genes play potential roles in UV-B related signaling.

Our phylogenies (Fig. 1) showed that the MAPKK gene family undergone at least two ancient duplications that lead to the five subfamilies. There was at least one gene in group A and B before the split of the green alga and terrestrial plants, while the group D MKKs took place before the divergence of the land plants. Numerous lineage-specific duplicate genes in land plants were likely also caused by the WGDs or segmental duplications. The first duplication event resulted in the appearance of the group C MKK genes lineages gave arise to after the divergence of vascular plants. Subsequently, the second duplication event took place during the divergence of angiosperms which caused the appearance of group E MKK genes. After the separation of gymnosperms and angiosperms, deep duplications occurred at least once in each group (Fig. 3). In angiosperms, it has been reported that an ancient WGD event has produced multigene copies [[33] ]. So we observed a lot of gene and/or genome duplications in group A MKK genes in angiosperms (Fig. 3 and Additional file 10), which is the same as to the patterns of rhomboid and SET gene families [[46] , [47] ]. In eudicots, most species possess 4–8 MAPKK genes, apart from a few exceptions above 10, such as B. rapa, P. trichocarpa and G. max. Compared with their counterpart species, it has been shown that these species have undergone extra or more recent WGDs (Fig. 3). For example, Brassica experienced an extra recent whole-genome triplication (WGT) event in comparison to A. thaliana in Brassicales [[48] ], compliance with the principle of roughly twice as many MAPKK genes in B. rapa in comparison with the other species (Fig. 3). Similarly, WGDs maybe also conducive to the MAPKK gene diversification in G. max (Fig. 3; [[49] ]).

The NTF2 protein interacts specifically with the FxFG repeat-containing nucleoporins and Ran-GDP to form complexes [[50] ] resulting in the cytoplasmic-nuclear trafficking of Ran [[51] ]. The yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae) and Caenorhabditis elegans NTF2 orthology plays crucial roles and ntf2 mutants have significant imperfection in nuclear trafficking [[52] ]. However, the overexpression of NTF2 also hampers the nuclear import of Ran protein in Arabidopsis [[53] ]. Our data also showed that the NTF2 domain exists in 44 MKK3 genes from 38 plant species as early in algae and in mosses, pteridophyta as well as seed plants, including previously reported A. thaliana (Fig. 7a; [[53] ]). Then sequence alignment of NTF2 domain regions of all identified MKK3 exhibited a critical functional Ran-binding site such as aspartic and glutamic residues (Fig. 7b and c). Our results also revealed that the MKK-NTF fusions took place alone in several plants, including both eudicots and monocotyledons. In order to explore the evolutionary relationship all MKK3 fused NTF2 domain together with all NTF2 proteins from Arabidopsis, we performed the phylogenetic analyses which showed that fusions occurred at least three times and referred to homologs of NTF2a/b, NTF2–1 and NTF2–2 (Fig. 7d). In addition, the group B MKKs with NTF2 domain had a recent clades of lineage-specific paralogs, including one members such clades in soybean, B. distachyon and S. italica, respectively, revealing numerous gene duplication events (Fig. 7d). Apparently, some fusion proteins were more common in non-seed plants (i.e. NTF2a/b), while others were not extend to all phyla which may be involved in gene expansion in monocots and dicots (Fig. 7d). It has been suggested that most NTF2 domain in MKK3 have all the signatures of the functional NTF2, gradual loss of activity in the nuclear transport cannot be performed function as the MKK3 harboring NTF2 domain exhibit change of the conserved key residues, which may be involved with the gene function more and more sophisticated in the evolutionary process. Hence, the loss of NTF2 domain leads to sharply weaken the interaction ability of MKK3 [[54] ]. It is interesting that the Chlamydomonas genome contains a MKK3 which possess the 3'-NTF domain, suggesting that this delusional arrangement has got through a long and successful evolutionary history in the photosynthetic eukaryotes lineage [[10] ].

Although mutations have happened in some genes, new and inactive MKK genes were by no means generated as expected previous reports indicated that a mutation of MKKs in serine or theronine residues gave rise to the abolishment of these kinase activity [[37] ]. However, depending on the public tiling array data and mutant phenotypes, apparently, the function of AtMKK10 that is catalytically inactive is associated with pollen development despite the sequence change in phosphorylation site (Fig. 6b, c). According to our RT-qPCR experiments, BdMKK10–5 have same situation in its phosphorylation site is up-regulated after UV-B treatment (Additional file 20). More interesting, previous studies had shown that the average root growth rate for double mutant MKK10/MPK3 or MKK10/MPK6 was higher than anyone single mutant of them [[55] ], and also the transcripts of MKK10 significantly changed after PPV-infected protoplasts [[56] ]. More studied have been reported showed that part mutant MAPKK gene was involved with disease resistance in rice and ethylene-dependent cell death in maize, respectively, which can phosphorylate MAPK6 and MAPK3 in vivo [[57] , [58] ]. Furthermore, AtMKK10 have experienced mutations in phosphorylation key active site and exhibited different expression profiles from AtMKK7/8/9 (Fig. 6a). So, the mutant paralogs might still maintain the kinase activity to downstream target proteins.

A total of 365 MKK genes were retrieved from 51 plant species using bioinformatics approaches based on the presence of a conserved S/T-X5-S/T domain. Our phylogenetic analyses revealed that group A and B MKKs first appeared in the common ancestors of all green plants, while group C and D MKKs were the rear to arise along with appearance of land or seed plants, respectively, with subsequent divergence of Group E MKKs in flowering plants. It was noteworthy that Group B MKKs were very different compared to those of other groups in many aspects of structure, including exon/intron organizations, phase pattern and NTF2 motif in the MKKs, as well as the biological functions of NTF2 domain with MKK3 will be gradually lost the activity during the evolution despite the loss of this domain maybe affected interaction capability of oneself. The group A MKKs expanded during the evolution, through WGDs followed by diversifications, while group E MKKs expanded during monocots evolution through the ancient tandem duplications. These data revealed novel viewpoints about the function and evolution history of plant MKKs.

Mitogen-activated protein kinase kinase (MAPKK) gene information from the model plant A. thaliana and rice were downloaded from The Arabidopsis Information Resources database (TAIR: http://www.arabidopsis.org/) [[59] ] and the TIGR rice Genome Annotation Resources database (http://rice.plantbiology.msu.edu/) [[60] ], respectively. To identify MAPKK genes of unknown species, BLASTP searches was conducted using orthologous protein sequences A. thaliana and O. sativa MAPKKs as the query search [[61] ] in the publicly available PLAZA database (http://bioinformatics.psb.ugent.be/plaza/) [[62] ] and phytozome database (http://www.phytozome.net/) [[63] ]. The coding and genomic sequences of MAPKK genes were collected in 51 plant species (Table [1] ). The gene was only considered as probable MAPKK gene if it harbored the serine/threonine−/dual specificity protein kinase domain, including the active site motif D(L/I/V)K and the phosphorylation site S/T-X5-S/T within the activation loop, which was subsequently confirmed by scanning in InterPro software for the presence of MKK's conserved domain [[64] ]. All data were checked for redundancy and no any alternative splice variants were considered.

The exon/intron structure of individual MKK gene was confirmed by the Gene Structure Display Server (GSDS) software (http://gsds.cbi.pku.edu.cn/). Multiple sequence alignment of the identified amino acid sequences of MAPKK genes were performed by the Clustal Omega (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/Tools/msa/clustalo/). The alignment logos of the protein conserved domain were generated with WebLogo (http://weblogo.threeplusone.com/). The conserved domains and motifs in the MAPKKs were predicted using InterProScan against protein database (http://www.ebi.ac.uk/interpro/). The schematic of the structure of all members of MAPKKs were performed according to the InterProScan analysis results. Subcellular localization predictions of each MAPKK were carried out using CELLO server (http://cello.life.nctu.edu.tw/) [[65] ]. The theoretical pI (isoelectric point) and Mw (molecular weight) of MAPKKs were performed using Compute pI/Mw tool online (http://web.expasy.org/compute%5fpi/). Structural modelling of the NTF2 domain was carried out with Phyre2 using amino acid sequence of the NTF2 domain from At5G40440 (aa 366–516) and the best structure (highest percent identity, most sequence coverage) modelled after S. cerevisiae NTF2-like domain Mex67:Mtr2 (PDB: 4WWU) was picked as a template [[66] ].

The aligned cDNA sequences were used to calculate the value of Ka and Ks as well as their ratios using DNASP v5.10 [[67] ]. To investigate the genetic divergence between each group, we counted the genetic distances on the basis of the amino acid sequences with the Jones-Taylor-Thornton (JTT) model in the Molecular Evolution Genetic Analysis 6.0 (MEGA 6.0) [[68] ]. The overall mean distances of all MAPKKs were measured using MEGA6 software. The MEGA file used to construct phylogenetic tree were also devoted to calculate the overall mean distance of plant MAPKKs.

Phylogeny of all plant species we surveyed in this study was performed using PhyloT program (http://phylot.biobyte.de/) with the NCBI taxonomy IDs for each species and visualized with iTOL program. The phylogenetic trees were constructed based on the maximum-likelihood (ML) method with a JTT model and the bootstrap test was carried out with 2000 iterations by the MEGA 6.0 software [[68] ]. To insure the more divergent domains could be conducive to the topology of the ML tree, all positions with 95% site coverage were eliminated. All the phylogenetic trees were deposited in Treebase (http://purl.org/phylo/treebase/phylows/study/TB2:S21358). The whole set of MAPKK protein sequences were assigned to different orthology groups using OrthoMCL [[69] ] after Blastp all vs all (e-value 1e − 10) (http://orthomcl.org/orthomcl/). Synteny analyses of duplicate gene pairs and the WGD data were achieved from the Plant Genome Duplication Database (PGDD; (http://chibba.agtec.uga.edu/duplication/index/locus) [[40] ]. MAPKKs we surveyed were produced by segmental duplication of the plant genome were determined by the analysis of the output file (Additional file 12) of the CoGe SynMap program (https://genomevolution.org/coge/SynMap.pl) obtained using a default parameter [[70] ].

In order to match the names with their function, all predicted MAPKKs were named using the orthologous based on the evolutionary relationship of MAPKKs with A. thaliana or O. sativa MKKs as suggested by Hamel et al. [[10] ]. In the nomenclature systems, the first letter in upper case represented the corresponding genus name, the species name was shown in the second lowercase letter (in a few cases the first 1–2 letters), after which the MAPKK and number of corresponding orthologs of O. sativa or Arabidopsis with human and two yeast lineages, respectively. If more than one ortholog existed in individual species, that is paralogs, the second number is followed by a hyphen to distinguish between paralogs.

Expression data of Arabidopsis MAPKKs were obtained from PLEXdb (AT40), including following Arabidopsis tissues: inflorescence, petals, stamen, pedicels, sepals, carpels, pollen, seedling, root, leaf, shoot and pistil. As well as following Arabidopsis mutants: ap1–15, ap2–6, ap3–6, ag-12, clv3–7, lfy-12 and ufo-1. Mapped reads were uniquely applied to deeper analysis. Gene expression levels were quantified by RPKM (reads per kilobase of mRNA length per million of mapped reads). Expression data of MAPKK genes in rice (GSE27726), poplar (GSE30507) and maize (GSE27004) were also downloaded from NCBI GEO database. Microarray data of Arabidopsis under abiotic treatment were also obtained from NCBI GEO data (GSE5620-GSE5628) in our analysis. For RT-qPCR analyses, 2-week-old B. distachyon Bd21 plants grown in each box were used for harvesting root, stem, leaf, young caryopsis and seedling samples. For UV-B treatments analysis, two-week-old B. distachyon Bd21 plants were treated as described previously [[71] ]. Plants were harvested for further analyses after treatment 1 h, 3 h, 6 h, 12 h and 24 h, respectively. The primer-sets were listed in Additional file 21.

MJ and ZC conceived and designed the project. MJ executed the bioinformatics analysis, conducted the experiments and wrote the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

The B. distachyon Bd21 seeds used in this work were supplied by International Brachypodium Initiative (USDA-ARS Western Regional Research Center, USA). Plants were grown in the growth room for sample collection. The research conducted in this study required neither approval from an ethics committee, nor involved any human or animal subjects.

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

We want to thank the contributors of the plant Genome Database, which was a convenient tool used to search for plant MAPKK genes.

All work was funded by the Grant from Chinese Academy of Sciences strategic resource service network planning of plant germplasm resources innovation project ZSZC-013 and Grant from Shanghai Landscaping Administrative Bureau (Grant Nos.G162406 and G162407). These funding bodies had no role in study design, analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

All data generated or analyzed during this study is included in this published article and its supplementary information files.