*4.8. Chromosomal Distribution and Exon-Intron Structure Analysis*

Chromosomal information of predicted *EXO70* genes from each species was obtained after using cDNA sequences as a query sequence blasted to the genomic sequence to determine their chromosomal locations. Then we drew their locations onto the physical map of each chromosome using MapInspect tool (http://mapinspect.software.informer.com/).

The gff3 files of each species was downloaded from the Ensembl Plants FTP server (http://plants. ensembl.org/index.html) on 20 January 2018 for exon–intron structure analysis; the image of the exon–intron structure was obtained using the online Gene Structure Display Server (last accessed date on 20 January 2018) with the gff3 files for each species [91]. The corresponding evolutionary tree were constructed by Mega v6.0 [88], all sequences were aligned by ClustalW using the default parameters [92,93], used the Neighbor-Joining method with the pairwise deletion option, Poisson correction and bootstrap analysis conducted with 1000 replicates [26,94]
