CA, USA) to amplify the different target regions. *4.2. Phylogenetic Relationships, Sequence Alignment and Physio-Chemical Properties of CaChi Genes*

*4.2. Phylogenetic Relationships, Sequence Alignment and Physio-Chemical Properties of CaChi Genes*  Multiple sequence alignment of the pepper chitin-binding proteins were performed by ClustalW according to previous studies on plant chitinases [15,32,33]. The phylogenetic tree was built with iTOL (Available online: https://itol.embl.de/) [79] using neighbor-joining (NJ) method with 1000 bootstrap replicates. Nomenclature of the putative CaChi genes were assigned based on their class and chromosomal order. To compute the molecular formula, total number of items, instability index, Multiple sequence alignment of the pepper chitin-binding proteins were performed by ClustalW according to previous studies on plant chitinases [15,32,33]. The phylogenetic tree was built with iTOL (Available online: https://itol.embl.de/) [79] using neighbor-joining (NJ) method with 1000 bootstrap replicates. Nomenclature of the putative CaChi genes were assigned based on their class and chromosomal order. To compute the molecular formula, total number of items, instability index, molecular weight (MW), molecular formula (MF) and theoretical isoelectric point (*p*I), the amino acid sequences were blast in Expasy ProtoParam (Available online: http://web.expasy.org/

protparam/) [80] and WoLF 32 PSORT II (Available online: http://www.genscript.com/wolf-psort. html) [81]. The TargetP online tool (Available online: http://www.cbs.dtu.dk/services/TargetP/) [82] was used to predict the subcellular locations.
