| Summary: | Valine-glutamine (VQ) motif-containing proteins are a class of highly conserved transcriptional regulators in plants and play key roles in plant growth, development, and response to various stresses. However, the <i>VQ</i> family genes in mustard have not yet been comprehensively identified and analyzed. In this study, a total of 120 <i>VQ</i> family genes (<i>BjuVQ1</i> to <i>BjuVQ120</i>), which were unevenly distributed on 18 chromosomes (AA_Chr01 to BB_Chr08), were characterized in mustard. A phylogenetic tree analysis revealed that the BjuVQ proteins were clustered into nine distinct groups (groups I to IX), and members in the same group shared a highly conserved motif composition. A gene structure analysis suggested that most <i>BjuVQ</i> genes were intronless. A gene duplication analysis revealed that 254 pairs of <i>BjuVQ</i> genes were segmentally duplicated and one pair was tandemly duplicated. Expression profiles obtained from RNA-seq data demonstrated that most <i>BjuVQ</i> genes have different gene expression profiles in different organs, including leaf, stem, root, flower bud, pod, and seed. In addition, over half of the <i>BjuVQ</i> genes were differentially expressed at some time points under low temperature treatment. The qRT-PCR data revealed that <i>BjuVQ23</i>, <i>BjuVQ55</i>, <i>BjuVQ57</i>, <i>BjuVQ67</i>, <i>BjuVQ100</i>, and <i>BjuVQ117</i> were upregulated in response to cold stress. Taken together, our study provides new insights into the roles of different <i>BjuVQ</i> genes in mustard and their possible roles in growth and development, as well as in response to cold stress.
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