Abstract
Overwinter survival has to be under critical regulation in the lifecycle of herbaceous perennial plants. Gentians (Gentiana L.) maintain their perennial life style through producing dormant and freezing-tolerant overwinter buds (OWBs) to overcome cold winter. However, the mechanism acting on such an overwinter survival and the genes/proteins contributing to it have been poorly understood. Previously, we identified an OWB-enriched protein W14/15, a member of a group of α/β hydrolase fold superfamily that is implicated in regulation of hormonal action in plants. The W14/15 gene has more than ten variant types in Gentiana species. However, roles of the W14/15 gene in OWB survival and functional difference among those variants have been unclear. In the present study, we examined whether the W14/15 gene variants are involved in the mechanism acting on overwinter survival, by crossing experiments using cultivars carrying different W14/15 variant alleles and virus-induced gene silencing experiments. We found that particular types of the W14/15 variants (W15a types) contributed toward obtaining high ability of overwinter survival, while other types (W14b types) did not, or even interfered with the former type gene. This study demonstrates two findings; first, contribution of esterase genes to winter hardiness, and second, paired set or paired partner among the allelic variants determines the ability of overwinter survival.
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Acknowledgments
This work was supported in part by “Research and Development Projects for Application in Promoting New Policy of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries” from the Ministry of Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries of Japan (to T.H. and K.T.), and by a grant-in-aid for scientific research from the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology of Japan (to K.T.). We thank Dr. K. Kume, S. Chiba, and Y. Endo for their technical assistance.
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Communicated by S. Hohmann.
Nucleotide sequence data are available in the DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank Database under the accession numbers AB281493, AB281494, AB573233, AB573234, AB587674 and AB587675.
T. Hikage and N. Yamagishi contributed equally to this work.
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Hikage, T., Yamagishi, N., Takahashi, Y. et al. Allelic variants of the esterase gene W14/15 differentially regulate overwinter survival in perennial gentian (Gentiana L.). Mol Genet Genomics 291, 989–997 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00438-015-1160-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00438-015-1160-1