RESEARCH ARTICLE
Isolation and Characterization of the Betaine Aldehyde Dehydrogenase Gene in
Jun Liua, Huiming Zenga, Xue Lia, Lixin Xua, Yingbo Wanga, Wei Tang*, b, Liebao Han*, a
Article Information
Identifiers and Pagination:
Year: 2010Volume: 4
First Page: 18
Last Page: 25
Publisher ID: TOBIOTJ-4-18
DOI: 10.2174/1874070701004010018
Article History:
Received Date: 23/10/2009Revision Received Date: 16/02/2010
Acceptance Date: 24/02/2010
Electronic publication date: 5/5/2010
Collection year: 2010
open-access license: This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License (CC-BY 4.0), a copy of which is available at: (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode). This license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
Abstract
Betaine aldehyde dehydrogenase (BADH) catalyzes the last step in the synthesis of the glycine betaine from choline. The BADH gene from turfgrass Ophiopogon japonicus has not been reported. In this study, we first isolated the full length cDNA of betaine aldehyde dehydrogenase gene (OjBADH) from O. japonicus using Reverse Transcriptase- Polymerase Chain Reaction (RT-PCR) and Rapid Amplification of cDNA Ends (RACE) techniques. The OjBADH gene (GenBank accession number: DQ645888) has 1785 nucleotides with the 5’ untranscribed region (UTR) of 63 nucleotides, 3’ UTR of 219 nucleotides, and an open reading frame of 1503 nucleotides. This gene encodes a polypeptide of 500 amino acids. It shares a high homology with BADH genes of other Chenopodiaceae species. The putative protein includes a conservative region of phosphofructokinase, aldehyde dehydrogenase, and glutamy phosphoric acid reductase. Overexpression of OjBADH in transgenic tobacco plants demonstrated 2-2.5 folds increase of glycine betaine content and 60- 85% increase of survival rate under salt tolerance. These results suggested that the O. japonicus BADH gene may be used to engineer plants for salt stress tolerance.