Gene expression studies in oil palm tissue culture: an approach towards biomarker discovery
2007
Ooi, S.E. | M. Ong-Abdullah
A large collection of ESTs had been obtained by various approaches from various developmental stages and tissues of the oil palm. These approaches included generation of ESTs, cold plaque screening and suppressive subtractive hybridization (SSH) and targeted RT-PCR. Some of the interesting ESTs, which encoded putative transcription factors and signaling proteins, were further characterized. As NAC genes have been shown to be important for meristem function, they were also isolated from oil palm suspension cultures using the RT-PCR method and characterized. After further expression studies, our first putative biomarker set for embryogenesis was defined. This wi11 however require further validation studies. Further attempts to isolate more biomarkers are ongoing, using microarray analysis and targeted gene expression studies. The latter includes using genes involved in hormone signaling pathways or have been known to be induced by hormones, as plant growth regulators have long been known to play key roles in inducing somatic embryogenesis in various plant species. In the early stages of oil palm tissue culture, the primary hormone manipulated is auxin. Due to the intricate interactions between hormone signal transduction pathways, manipulation of one pathway is likely to involve other pathways. The correlation of gene expression profiles of selected genes to the performance of particular genotypes in tissue culture may hopefully provide an indication of the embryogenic potential of the particular genotype. This was conducted by real time PCR analysis of genes presumed to be induced by the specific hormones as reported by previous studies.
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