Murali Kannan M , Jeevanandam Vanitha , Shuye Jiang , Srinivasan Ramachandran

Temasek Life Sciences Laboratory, 1 Research Link, the National University of Singapore, 117604, Singapore
Author    Correspondence author
Molecular Plant Breeding, 2013, Vol. 4, No. 15   doi: 10.5376/mpb.2013.04.0015
Received: 15 Apr., 2013    Accepted: 07 May, 2013    Published: 23 May, 2013

This is an open access article published under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Murali et al., 2013, Impact of Colchicine Treatment on Sorghum bicolor BT×623, Molecular Plant Breeding, Vol.4, No.15 128-135 (doi: 10.5376/mpb.2013.04.0015)

Colchicine is an alkaloid from Colchicum autumnale, which is widely used for the induction of polyploidy plants. No highly efficient method has been reported for the development of polyploidy plants in the grain sorghum BT×623. In this study, the sorghum seeds were treated with colchicine at two different concentrations (0.1% and 0.2%) for 24, 48 and 72 hours (hr). The impact of colchicine treatment on morphological, physiological, histological variations as well as on sucrose synthase gene expression was investigated. Some significant variations by comparing the control and colchicine treated plants were observed. The colchicine treated plants showed longer leaf length and stronger root system but exhibited smaller panicle size. Enlarged cells and some deformities by histology observation were also observed. The density of stomata decreased and its length increased with more opened guard cells in colchicine treated plants when compared with the control plants. Gene expression analysis showed that higher expression abundance was detected for most of genes encoding sucrose synthases in some colchicine treated plants and only one gene exhibited lower level of transcription abundance.

Colchicine; Gene expression; Seeds; Sorghum bicolor