*2.5. miRNA Prediction in Wheat PAL Family Genes*

miRNA prediction was carried out as previously described [42]. In detail, all the genome sequences of *TaPAL* genes were submitted against the available reference of miRNA sequences using the psRNATarget Server (https://www.zhaolab.org/psRNATarget/, accessed on 14 September 2021) with default setting [43]. While the visualization of interaction was carried out with the help of Cytoscape software (https://cytoscape.org/, accessed on 14 September 2021) by following the default setting [44].

#### *2.6. Promoter and Gene Ontology (GO) Enrichment Analysis*

The upstream 1 kb nucleotide sequence from the start codon was retrieved for promoter analysis of all the 37 *TaPAL* genes using the Ensembl Plants database (http://plants.ensembl. org/Triticum\_aestivum/, accessed on 19 June 2021). Subsequently, these were also subjected to identification of the already-defined motif by using the PLACE *cis*-regulatory element database [2,45]. These databases also helped to obtain five *cis*-regulatory elements (CACTFTPPCA1, CATTBOX1, ARR1AT, CGCGBOXAT, and WBOXNTERF) and their location. GO analysis of TaPAL protein sequences was conducted by using online

tool gProfiler (https://biit.cs.ut.ee/gprofiler/gost, accessed on 20 June 2021) with default parameters [46].
