Establishing virus-induced gene silencing system in Sinningia speciosa (Gesneriaceae)
Date Issued
2010
Date
2010
Author(s)
Hong, Tzu-Huan
Abstract
This study aims to build a virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS) system in Sinningia speciosa. Sinningia speciosa, Gesneriaceae, is an ornamental plant and became an emerging model for studying flower development. In wild, flowers of Sinningia speciosa are zygomorphic, but many of their domestic conterparts are actinomorphy. The zygomorphic wild type and actinomorphic peloria provide us an excellent opportunity to compare their flower development and explore functions of candidate genes in floral symmetric regulation. VIGS is a powerful tool for studying gene functions. We chose two viral systems: Tobacco rattle virus (TRV) and Cymbidium mosaic virus (CymMV) to test their silencing ability on phytoene desaturase (PDS) in S. speciosa. Our results showed that S. speciosa could be systemically infected by TRV, but no down-regulation of PDS observed; however, CymMV caused down-regulation of PDS in some S. speciosa individuals though they did not display expected photo-bleaching. Agrobacterium inoculation was also tested. However, Agrobacterium showed poor infectivity to S. speciosa and Agrobacterium inoculation failed to help increase the VIGS efficiency. Concluding our results, the failure to induce VIGS by TRV in S. speciosa may be due to the poor infectivity. Besides optimizing the inoculation conditions, constructing new VIGS vectors from viruses that naturally occurring in S. speciosa or virus clones with more infectivity by domestication is preferred in the future. In addition, PDS of S. speciosa seems to be successfully down-regulated by CymMV, but the phenotype was not changed. To better confirm that gene silencing can be efficiently induced by CymMV in S. speciosa, more reporter genes should be tested.
Subjects
Sinningia speciosa
virus-induced gene silencing
Tobacco rattle virus
Cymbisium mosaic virus
phytoene desaturas
Agrobacterium inoculation
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