*2.3. Phylogenetic Identification*

To retrieve the protein sequence containing the PAL domain, 37 protein sequences of wheat were used as queries to BLASTP against the *Triticum urartu*, *Solanum tuberosum,* and *Hordeum vulgare*. The protein sequences with more than 70% sequence identity were downloaded from NCBI (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/, accessed on 16 June 2021). The *PAL* genes of *Arabidopsis thaliana, Zea mays,* and *Oryza sativa* were retrieved from Ensembl (http://plants.ensembl.org, accessed on 18 June 2021). Molecular Evolutionary Genetics Analysis (MEGA version X) [38] was used to infer the evolutionary history of TaPAL by the maximum-likelihood (ML) method and 1000 bootstrap replicates were used. While the gene duplication was calculated by using MCScanX in Tbtools [39].

#### *2.4. Synteny Analysis*

The visualization sequence identity and synteny analysis of the *PAL* family genes were performed using Tbtools [40]. These analyses were used to study the sequence similarity patterns [41].
