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Phylogenetic and evolutionary analysis of A-, B-, C- and E-class MADS-box genes in the basal eudicot Platanus acerifolia

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Abstract

London plane tree (Platanus acerifolia Willd.) is an important member of the Platanaceae family, being popular as an urban landscaping tree. Here, we report the isolation of five MADS-box genes from the basal angiosperm, Platanus acerifolia. Sequence and phylogenetic analyses identified FRUITFUL-like, APETELA3-like, AGAMOUS-like, SEPALLATA1-like and SEPALLATA3-like sequences and, hence, we term the respective Platanus acerifolia genes as PlacFUL, PlacAP3, PlacAG, PlacSEP1 and PlacSEP3. From these identities we infer that they represent candidate A-, B-, C-class and two E-class genes, respectively. The conserved MIK or MIKC domains from the nucleotide and protein sequences of PlacFUL, PlacAP3, PlacAG, PlacSEP1 and PlacSEP3 were analyzed using the maximum-likelihood, MrBayes and neighbor-joining methods. The results confirmed P. acerifolia as a basal eudicot. Expression pattern was determined by reverse transcriptase PCR, which showed all paralogous genes have distinct expression patterns, suggesting that they had undergone functional divergence.

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Acknowledgments

This programme of research was supported by funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (30500394 and 30871729) to Liu G-F, the Ministry of Education Foundation of China (NCET-04-0733) to Bao M-Z and the International Fund of Science (IFS-D/4831-1) to Li Z-N. We thank Dr. Alex C. McCormac for critical editing of the manuscript, Song Chi and Dr. Jiang Yue for divergence time analysis and all the colleagues in our laboratory for technical assistance.

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  1. Zhineng Li

    Present address: Wuhan Botanical Garden, Key Laboratory of Germplasm Enhancement and Specialty Agriculture, The Chinese Academy of Sciences, Wuhan, 430074, People’s Republic of China

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Horticultural Plant Biology, Ministry of Education, College of Horticulture and Forestry Sciences, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan, 430070, People’s Republic of China

    Zhineng Li, Jiaqi Zhang, Guofeng Liu, Xiaomei Li, Chen Lu, Junwei Zhang & Manzhu Bao

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  1. Zhineng Li
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Correspondence to Manzhu Bao.

Additional information

The gene sequences have been deposited in GenBank and will appear under the accession numbers PlacFUL (GU296505), PlacAP3 (EF488452), PlacAG (GU296506), PlacSEP1 (EF686225) and PlacSEP3 (GU296507).

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Li, Z., Zhang, J., Liu, G. et al. Phylogenetic and evolutionary analysis of A-, B-, C- and E-class MADS-box genes in the basal eudicot Platanus acerifolia . J Plant Res 125, 381–393 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10265-011-0456-4

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