Abstract
Germination and synchronous seedling emergence are necessary for crop yield. One differentially expressed Cupin protein during maize seed germination had been identified in our previous study. To elucidate the functional sites in its coding gene, ZmGLP, a diverse maize association population was assayed. In alignment with B73, the ZmGLP gene contains five exons and encodes 522 amino acids, and a potential signal peptide domain from the 7 to 22 amino acids and a typical Cupin domain from the 332 to 477 amino acids were identified. The ZmGLP has a quick linkage disequilibrium decay with about 300 bp physical distance in the analyzed sequences, which implied that human selection might be undone in this gene. High genetic variations were evidenced in ZmGLP gene with 118 polymorphic sites in the association population. An Indel9 (18 bp) in the fifth exon of the intermotif region of the second Cupin domain, which influences the formation of C coil in the barrel folding, was detected significantly associated with germination vigor of maize seeds. The 18-bp insertion, which might help keeping the barrel folding intact, was a favorable allele for relative high germination vigor. Evolution analysis showed that this 18-bp deletion was a loss-of-function mutation. However, the action mode of ZmGLP is still yet to be further studied for maize improvement.
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Acknowledgments
This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31000715), the State Key Laboratory of Wheat and Maize Crop Science (SKL2014ZH-09), and the Shanghai Science and Technology Committee (11DZ2272100). The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
Author contributions
Conceived and designed the experiments: ZF and JT. Performed the experiments: ZF, ZZ, YQ, BW, and HG. Analyzed the data: ZF. Wrote and edited the paper: ZF.
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Figure S1
ZmGLP gene structures based on maize inbred B73 genomic sequence. Exons are highlighted in yellow, other defined features in blue, polymorphisms of interest in green, significant association site in purple, and primers for entire sequence in red. (DOCX 33 kb)
Figure S2
Codominant InDel9 PCR marker in 41 teosinte accessions. (JPEG 134 kb)
Figure S3
Comparison of the two Cupin domains between two ZmGLP proteins, globulin, and germ in maize. (JPEG 475 kb)
Figure S4
Potential changes in protein secondary structure resulting from InDel9. (JPEG 369 kb)
Table S1
. (XLSX 12 kb)
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Fu, Z., Zhao, Z., Qin, Y. et al. Functional marker related to germination vigor of maize seed. Mol Breeding 36, 159 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11032-016-0581-9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11032-016-0581-9