Yongfeng Lou¹ , Xiaochen Song¹ , Huayu Sun² , Zhimin Gao²

1 Jiangxi Academy of Forestry, Jiangxi Provincial Key Laboratory of Plant Biotechnology, Nanchang, 330013, China
2 Institute of Gene and Industrialization for Bamboo and Rattan Resources, International Center for Bamboo and Rattan, State Forestry and Grassland Administration, Beijing Key Laboratory on the Science and Technology of Bamboo and Rattan, Beijing, 1001023, China
Author    Correspondence author
Molecular Plant Breeding, 2020, Vol. 11, No. 30   doi: 10.5376/mpb.2020.11.0030
Received: 20 Nov., 2020    Accepted: 18 Dec., 2020    Published: 31 Dec., 2020

This article was first published in Molecular Plant Breeding in Chinese, and here was authorized to translate and publish the paper in English under the terms of Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Lou Y.F., Song X.C., Sun H.Y., and Gao Z.M., 2020, Cloning and primary functional analysis of PeGRF1 in Phyllostachys edulis, Molecular Plant Breeding, 11(30): 1-9 (doi: 10.5376/mpb.2020.11.0030)

To explore the role of Growth regulating-factor (GRF) in the growth of bamboo shoots, one GRF gene was isolated from moso bamboo (Phyllostachys edulis) by RT-PCR. Bioinformatics methods were used for gene sequence analysis, and the expression pattern of the GRF gene in bamboo shoots at different development stages was analyzed by qRT-PCR. Simultaneously, ectopic expression in Arabidopsis was conducted to validate the gene function. The result showed that the isolated gene from moso bamboo was 1 164 bp, encoding 387 amino acids, which was named as PeGRF1. Protein sequence analysis showed that PeGRF1 had the complete typical domains (WRC and QLQ) of GRF family. The phylogenetic analysis demonstrated that PeGRF1 were clustered closer to the GRFs of monocotyledonous plants such as Oryza sativa, indicating they had close relationship. PeGRF1 expressed predominantly in young bamboo shoots. Meanwhile, the expression level of PeGRF1 was significantly higher during rapid growth stage than that during slow growth stage of bamboo shoots, and the expression level of PeGRF1 in the upper and middle of bamboo shoots was significantly higher than that in the base. Overexpression of PeGRF1 could increase the plant height of transgenic Arabidopsis. Taken together, our results demonstrated that PeGRF1 was involved in development of bamboo shoots, which provided references for elucidating the biological functions of GRF genes in bamboo. 

Phyllostachys edulis; GRF gene; Functionl analysis; Stem growth