cDNA-AFLP analysis on transcripts associated with bolting in

Abstract

Premature bolting, caused by low temperature in spring and summer cultivation in low land and high land respectively, leads to reduction of the yield and quality of the harvested products in Chinese cabbage. Therefore, exploring genes involved in vernalization response is important to the improvement of Chinese cabbage varieties. Here, one extremely early bolting line (DH-54) and one extremely late bolting line (DH-43) were employed, and the cDNA-AFLP approach was used to identify key components involved in the low-temperature required vernalization response. Of 256 primer recombinations screened, a total of 191 differential expressed transcript-derived fragments (TDFs) were identified, and 82 TDFs were sequenced. BLAST and alignments showed that 52 candidate TDFs shared high levels of similarity with genes of known function, 22 TDFs of unknown function and 8 novel ESTs. The TDFs of known function were involved in genes encoding enzymes working in metabolism, proteins related to stress and defense, signal transduction, and transcription regulation, etc.

Improved efficiency of microspore culture of Brassica campestris ssp. pekinensis (Chinese cabbage)

“…In recent years, isolated microspore culture has attracted a lot of interest because of its great potential for DH production. A microspore-derived embryo is also a suitable system for gene mapping (Graner, 1996;Zhang et al 2005;Geng et al, 2007;Yu et al, 2008), genetic transformation (Stǒger et al, 1995) and selection of dominant and recessive traits (Polsoni et al, 1988;Swanson, 1989;Liu et al, 2003;Wang et al, 2008;Zou et al, 2009). Since Lichter (1982) first reported the embryogenesis in microspore cultures of Brassica napus, embryogenesis has been induced in microspore cultures of different Brassica species (Babbar et al, 2004).…”