Abdelhamid S.¹ , Yoon  I.S.² , Byun  M.O.K.²

1.Olive Tree Institute, Laboratory of Molecular Biology, Rue de l’Aéroport, B.P 1087, 3000-Sfax, Tunisia;
2.National Academy of Agricultural Science, Molecular Breeding Division, RDA, Jeonju, 560-500, Republic of Korea.
Author    Correspondence author
Molecular Plant Breeding, 2015, Vol. 6, No. 18   doi: 10.5376/mpb.2015.06.0018
Received: 22 Jun., 2015    Accepted: 11 Aug., 2015    Published: 28 Oct., 2015

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.

Abdelhamid S., Yoon I.S.,and Byun M.O.k., 2015, DNA Sequence Variation of Aquaporins Candidate Genes (TIP and PIP2) For Drought Stress Response in Tunisian olive Cultivars (Olea Europaea L.)., Interaction, Molecular Plant Breeding, 6(18): 1-8 (doi: 10.5376/mpb.2015.06.0018)

Aquaporins (AQPs) have been shown to be involved in drought stress response. It is widely known that drought may be considered one of the most frequent environmental constraints in Tunisia. In particular, the arid and semi-arid areas are subjected to high solar radiation and a high rate of evapo-transpiration. We describe the genetic diversity in TIP and PIP2 genes in 15 Tunisian olive cultivars.
 
Targeted-PCR amplification yielded polymorphisms giving in total 119 SNPs. Genetic variation at the nucleotide level was estimated from nucleotide diversity and from the number of segregating sites (πTIP = 0.0024; πPIP 2= 0.0017; ϴTIP = 0.0020 and ϴPIP2 = 0.0013 respectively). The studied cultivars showed higher values of nucleotide diversity in synonymous sites as well as in non-synonymous sites. Higher expected heterozygosity and higher observed homozygosity were found in TIP fragment gene than in PIP2 gene. Each gene based-marker classified the cultivars under investigation into clear separated clusters but not according to their environment range. Although, partial agreement was achieved with respect to cultivars relationships with PIP2 gene data.

The results indicate that the SNP represents an efficient molecular marker system for the assessment of Tunisian olive genetic diversity at studied aquaporin genes and, hence, the knowledge of genetic diversity of olive cultivars exposed to variable environmental conditions to preserve this valuable tree species..
 

ea europaea L; nucleotide diversity; Aquaporine; TIP, PIP2; SNP