Reference "The Purple leaf (Pl) locus of rice: the Pl(w) allele has a complex organization and includes two genes encoding basic helix-loop-helix proteins involved in anthocyanin biosynthesis"

Reference ID

6973

Title

The Purple leaf (Pl) locus of rice: the Pl(w) allele has a complex organization and includes two genes encoding basic helix-loop-helix proteins involved in anthocyanin biosynthesis

Source

Plant & cell physiology, 2001, vol. 42, pp. 982-991

Authors (8)

Sakamoto-W	Ohmori-T
Kageyama-K	Miyazaki-C
Saito-A	Murata-M
Noda-K	Maekawa-M

Abstract

The Purple leaf (Pl) locus of rice (Oryza sativa L.) affects regulation of
anthocyanin biosynthesis in various plant tissues. The tissue-specific patterns
of anthocyanin pigmentation, together with the syntenic relationship, indicate
that the rice Pl locus may play a role in the anthocyanin pathway similar to the
maize R/B loci. We isolated two cDNAs showing significant identity to the basic
helix-loop-helix (bHLH) proteins found in the maize R gene family. OSB1 appeared
to be allelic to the previously isolated R homologue, Ra1, but showed a striking
difference at the C-terminus because of a 2-bp deletion. Characterization of the
corresponding genomic region revealed that the sequence identical to a 5'-
portion of OSB2 existed approximately 10-kb downstream of the OSB1 coding
region. OSB2 lacks a conserved C-terminal domain. Restriction fragment length
polymorphism analyses using an F(2) population indicate that both genes co-
segregate with the purple leaf phenotype. A transient complementation assay
showed that the anthocyanin pathway is inducible by OSB1 or OSB2. These results
suggest that the Pl(w) allele may be complex and composed of at least two genes
encoding bHLH proteins.