GENETIC ANALYSIS OF CYTOCHROME B6 AND CYTOCHROME F GENES IN EGYPTIAN Moringa peregrina, A THREATENED WILD MEDICINAL PLANT

Moringa peregrina is a plant with a wide range of traditional, nutritional, industrial, and therapeutic uses. Its components are utilized in folk medicine for a variety of human health care. They contain sources of Cytochrome b6 and Cytochrome f genes that participate in various physiological activities, which need to be understood because no study has shown interest in these genes in the Egyptian M. peregrina. In the present investigation, we focus on the identification of novel cytochrome genes among Egyptian M. peregrina. This threatened medicinal plant was collected from the natural habitat in the Elba Mountain in the South-Eastern triangle Halayib in Egypt., in these concerns, chloroplast genes Cyt b6 and Cyt f were compared with the most fifty-nine sequence closer accessions data present in the NCBI database. The acquired fragments were sequenced using phylogenetic trees, PCA, Heat-map, genetic distance similarities between the fifty-eight NCBI accessions, and M. peregrine, which was analyzed using the Clustal w, Clustal vis, and iToL software. The results revealed we succeed in characterizing novel genes (Cyt b6 and Cyt f) which were submitted in the Gene bank database by (accession numbers: MZ005964 and MZ005965) as 612 and 894bp genome sequences for M. peregrina respectively and additionally, our phylogenetic tree was constructed using (Cyt b6 and Cyt f) genes that were showed a high level of genetic variability and diversity among plant species. According to the phylogenetic tree, Moringa is grouped in a single branch, separated from the root by a value of bootstrap 10%. This finding could be attributed to the genetic evolution of Moringa species that rely on this gene. The cytochrome-f gene, on the other hand, grouped Moringa species with other species such as Salvadora persica, with only a 7% genetic difference from the root depending on the genetic variation of this gene.