ERF and infection: The presence of cis-elements associated with immunity or defense reactions, including the ERF-box (Nishizawa-Yokoi et al., 2009), ABRE-box (Guo et al., 2016), and TGACG motif (Zander et al., 2012) within the promoter region of GhHSFA4a implies that the gene product may be involved in responses to pathogen infection.