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Isolation and characterization of two putative cytokinin oxidase genes related to grain number per spike phenotype in wheat

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Abstract

Cytokinin oxidases are involved in the regulation of plant cytokinin levels, which are important in regulating plant growth and development, and may affect the yield of cereals. Here, we report the isolation and characterization of two putative cytokinin oxidase genes, TaCKX2.1 and TaCKX2.2, from wheat. Both TaCKX2.1 and TaCKX2.2 are mapped to the 0.24–0.55 region of the short arm of wheat chromosome 3D and their coding proteins are most closely related to OsCKX2. Phylogenetic tree analysis reveals that TaCKX2.1 and TaCKX2.2 belong to the clustered clade I of monocot plants. Tissue expression pattern show that both TaCKX2.1 and TaCKX2.2 genes are highly expressed in young spikes and culms of wheat. The detailed spatial expression pattern of TaCKX2.1 were further conducted by in situ hybridization and promoter-fused GUS expression in Arabidopsis experiments. A collection of 12 typical common wheat varieties exhibiting grain number per spike ranging from 31 to 139 were used for the transcription abundance detection of two TaCKX2 genes. A significantly positive correlation between expression level of two TaCKX2 genes and grain number per spike suggests that TaCKX2.1 and TaCKX2.2 on wheat chromosome 3DS may play an important role in wheat spike morphogenesis.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Dr. Tianfu Han (Chinese Academy of Agricultural Science, China) for assistance in RNA in situ hybridization experiments and Dr. Yun Lian (China Agricultural University, China) for providing the transformation vector. This work was supported by Grants from the National Basic Research Program of China (Grant no. 2006CB101701) and the China Postdoctoral Science Foundation (Grant no. 20070410589).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. The National Key Facility for Crop Gene Resources and Genetic Improvement, Institute of Crop Sciences, Chinese Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Beijing, 100081, People’s Republic of China

    Jinpeng Zhang, Weihua Liu, Xinming Yang, Ainong Gao, Xiuquan Li, Xiaoyang Wu & Lihui Li

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  1. Jinpeng Zhang
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  2. Weihua Liu
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  3. Xinming Yang
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  7. Lihui Li
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Correspondence to Lihui Li.

Additional information

The nucleotide sequences reported in this paper have been submitted to (NCBI) under accession numbers FJ648070, GU084177 and FJ707293.

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Zhang, J., Liu, W., Yang, X. et al. Isolation and characterization of two putative cytokinin oxidase genes related to grain number per spike phenotype in wheat. Mol Biol Rep 38, 2337–2347 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11033-010-0367-9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11033-010-0367-9

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