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
a Institute of Turfgrass Science, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing 100083, China
b Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, Duke University, Durham 27708, USA


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Creative Commons License
© 2010 Liu et al.

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.

* Address correspondence to this author at the Institute of Turfgrass Science, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing 100083, China; Tel: 010-919-684-6507; Fax: 010-919-668-0795; E-mail: hanliebao@163.comCorrespondence: Institute for Genome Sciences and Policy, Duke University, Durham 27708, USA; Tel: +86-10-6233-7982; Fax: +86-10-6232-2089; E-mail: wei.tang@duke.edu


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.

Keywords: Betaine aldehyde dehydrogenase, Choline, Gene cloning, Ophiopogon japonicas, Turfgrass.