Abstract
ABSTRACTDNA methylation plays an important role in endosperm development and is involved in the epigenetic regulation of gene expression. However, the epigenetic regulation of castor seed development has not yet been reported. In this study, methylation-sensitive amplification polymorphism (MSAP) analysis was used to investigate the methylation level in castor. In 20-day-old castor seeds, 41.17% of the fragments were fully methylated and 15.61% were hemimethylated. In 60 day-old seed, the full methylation and hemimethylation rates were 19.77% and 7.56%, respectively, suggesting that some methylation level changes existed during the castor seed development. A total of 647 bands were identified with different methylation or demethylation patterns during the seed maturation. However, only 37 sequences were homologous to well-known proteins, such as phospholipid-transporting ATPase, phosphatases and methyltransferase. Therefore, these results clearly demonstrated that the MSAP technique is very useful for the analysis of the global DNA methylation state in castor and the complexity of DNA methylation changes during seed development. The different methylation levels may be correlated with the specific gene expression in different seed development stages.
Highlights
Castor (Ricinus communis L., Euphorbiaceae), an important non-edible oilseed crop, is widely grown for its oleaginous seeds which produce a lot of valuable oil [1]
A paper demonstrated that the seed yield of castor bean was significantly reduced by the exposure to cool temperatures during the seed-filling stage, and the oil yield was significantly dependent on the seed yield [5]
The results from the capillary gas chromatography analysis showed that the fatty acid compositions in castor seed included 11 components with large-scale variations (Table 1)
Summary
Castor (Ricinus communis L., Euphorbiaceae), an important non-edible oilseed crop, is widely grown for its oleaginous seeds which produce a lot of valuable oil [1]. Castor bean has been used as a medicinal material in over fifty countries [2]. Its oil has high commercial value in industry, many countries import castor oil stocks due to the lack of domestic production for several years [3]. Ribeiro et al [4] studied the gene expression in castor seeds in the germination and seedling stage. A paper demonstrated that the seed yield of castor bean was significantly reduced by the exposure to cool temperatures during the seed-filling stage, and the oil yield was significantly dependent on the seed yield [5]. An important potential use of castor has been tested in the phytoremediation of metalliferous waste or soils [7,8]
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