Identification and characterization of nuclear genes involved in photosynthesis in Populus

BMC Plant Biology

Research Article

Bowen Wang¹  Xiaohui Yang¹  Deqiang Zhang¹  Qingzhang Du¹ 

[1] National Engineering Laboratory for Tree Breeding, College of Biological Sciences and Technology, Beijing Forestry University, 100083, Beijing, P. R. China;Key Laboratory of Genetics and Breeding in Forest Trees and Ornamental Plants, Ministry of Education, College of Biological Sciences and Technology, Beijing Forestry University, 100083, Beijing, P. R. China;

关键词: Chitinase;    Nuclear Gene;    Photosynthetic Efficiency;    Growth Trait;    Bulk Segregant Analysis;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2229-14-81

 received in 2013-09-15, accepted in 2014-03-17,  发布年份 2014

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThe gap between the real and potential photosynthetic rate under field conditions suggests that photosynthesis could potentially be improved. Nuclear genes provide possible targets for improving photosynthetic efficiency. Hence, genome-wide identification and characterization of the nuclear genes affecting photosynthetic traits in woody plants would provide key insights on genetic regulation of photosynthesis and identify candidate processes for improvement of photosynthesis.ResultsUsing microarray and bulked segregant analysis strategies, we identified differentially expressed nuclear genes for photosynthesis traits in a segregating population of poplar. We identified 515 differentially expressed genes in this population (FC ≥ 2 or FC ≤ 0.5, P < 0.05), 163 up-regulated and 352 down-regulated. Real-time PCR expression analysis confirmed the microarray data. Singular Enrichment Analysis identified 48 significantly enriched GO terms for molecular functions (28), biological processes (18) and cell components (2). Furthermore, we selected six candidate genes for functional examination by a single-marker association approach, which demonstrated that 20 SNPs in five candidate genes significantly associated with photosynthetic traits, and the phenotypic variance explained by each SNP ranged from 2.3% to 12.6%. This revealed that regulation of photosynthesis by the nuclear genome mainly involves transport, metabolism and response to stimulus functions.ConclusionsThis study provides new genome-scale strategies for the discovery of potential candidate genes affecting photosynthesis in Populus, and for identification of the functions of genes involved in regulation of photosynthesis. This work also suggests that improving photosynthetic efficiency under field conditions will require the consideration of multiple factors, such as stress responses.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Wang et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.