Abstract
Lectins have been well studied and proved to play important roles in plant defense but information of legume lectins from non-legume plants has been rarely reported. A new legume lectin gene, designated as SmL 1, was cloned from Salvia miltiorrhiza Bunge, a famous traditional Chinese medicinal plant. The cDNA of SmL 1 was 919 bp in length and contained an 822 bp open reading frame (ORF) encoding a putative lectin precursor with two legume lectin domains. The deduced SML1 protein of SmL 1 shared 29 to 43% identities with other legume lectin sequences. Real time PCR analysis revealed that SmL 1 was predominantly expressed in the leaves and could be induced by pathogens and MeJA. The recombinant protein (rSmL1) of SmL 1 in Escherichia coli M15 was purified and showed agglutination activity towards rabbit and mouse red blood cells, and anti-bacterial activity against E. coli (ATCC35218), Pseudomonas lachrymans (PSL) and Xanthomonas campestris pv. Campestris (Pammel) Dowson (XC-1). Based on these results, SmL1 could play a role in medicinal plant disease control. Keywords: Anti-Bacterial Activity, Gene Expression, Legume Lectin, Recombinant Protein, Salvia miltiorrhiza Bunge
Highlights
Plant lectins or agglutinins are a large group of proteins, which possess at least one non-catalytic domain that binds reversibly to a specific mono- or oligosaccharide (Carlini and Grossi-de-Sa, 2002; Peumans and Van Damme, 1995)
Many lectins had been found with antimicrobial activity, such as lectins derived from Phthirusa pyrifolia leaves (Costa et al, 2010), Eugenia uniflora (EuniSL) (Oliveira et al, 2008) and Myracrodruon urundeuva (Sá et al, 2009)
The deduced amino acids sequence had two legume lectin domains, a lectin-legB domain, and a lectin-legA domain according to BLASTp search against NCBI (Figure 1b)
Summary
Plant lectins or agglutinins are a large group of proteins, which possess at least one non-catalytic domain that binds reversibly to a specific mono- or oligosaccharide (Carlini and Grossi-de-Sa, 2002; Peumans and Van Damme, 1995). Extralong Autumn Purple Bean (EAPL) and BanLec isolated from the fruit of bananas, indicated Anti-HIV-1 activities (Fang et al, 2010; Swanson et al, 2010) Some of them, such as a wheat germ agglutinin (WGA) (Ciopraga et al, 1999), Concanavalin A (Safina et al, 2008), Sebastiania jacobinensis bark lectin (SejaBL) (Vaz et al, 2010) and P. pyrifolia leaf lectin (Costa et al, 2010), have been tried to biologically control plant diseases. Different families of plant species, as well as different tissues within the same plant, can contain different lectins with different bioactivities, including different carbohydrate-binding specificities and antimicrobial activity (Charungchitrak et al, 2011) They occur widely in plants but manifest significant differences in bioactivities, which means only a few of them has application prospect. These results suggested that the application of this gene in genetically modified plants may be an efficient way to control root rot in S. miltiorrhiza and generate more profitable and productive yields without affecting environment
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