Abstract
Chloroplasts are organelles responsible for chlorophyll biosynthesis, photosynthesis, and biosynthesis of many metabolites, which are one of key targets for crop improvement. Elucidating and engineering genes involved in chloroplast development are important approaches for studying chloroplast functions as well as developing new crops. In this study, we report a long-lived albino mutant derived from a popular ornamental plant Epipremnum aureum ‘Golden Pothos’ which could be used as a model for analyzing the function of genes involved in chloroplast development and generating colorful plants. Albino mutant plants were isolated from regenerated populations of variegated ‘Golden Pothos’ whose albino phenotype was previously found to be due to impaired expression of EaZIP, encoding Mg-protoporphyrin IX monomethyl ester cyclase. Using petioles of the mutant plants as explants with a traceable sGFP gene, an efficient transformation system was developed. Expressing Arabidopsis CHL27 (a homolog of EaZIP) but not EaZIP in albino plants restored green color and chloroplast development. Interestingly, in addition to the occurrence of plants with solid green color, plants with variegated leaves and pale-yellow leaves were also obtained in the regenerated populations. Nevertheless, our study shows that these long-lived albino plants along with the established efficient transformation system could be used for creating colorful ornamental plants. This system could also potentially be used for investigating physiological processes associated with chlorophyll levels and chloroplast development as well as certain biological activities, which are difficult to achieve using green plants.
Highlights
In plants, chloroplasts are important organelles, responsible for producing pigments, harvesting solar energy and generating various metabolites (Block et al, 2007; Terry and Smith, 2013; Pogson et al, 2015)
Ascorbic acid was used as an antioxidant agent, which is due to the notion that albino plants lacking functional chloroplasts are unable to carry out photosynthesis and more sensitive to the photo-oxidation (Spoehr, 1942; Hess et al, 1994; García-Alcázar et al, 2017)
The present study demonstrates that albino plants regenerated from E. aureum ‘Golden Pothos’ are long-lived when maintained in a modified Murashige and Skoog (MS) culture medium under low light conditions (Figure 1)
Summary
Chloroplasts are important organelles, responsible for producing pigments, harvesting solar energy and generating various metabolites (Block et al, 2007; Terry and Smith, 2013; Pogson et al, 2015). Determining the roles of most nuclear-encoded plastid genes and elucidating mutual regulation of genes from two genomes during the chloroplast biogenesis and development remain big challenges because of the complexity and the lack of an effective experimental platform. Various experimental systems, such as dark-grown etiolated seedlings, various types of color-defective mutants including albino, variegated, and chemical/physical induced mutants, have been used for aforementioned studies (McCormac and Terry, 2004; Yu et al, 2007; Pogson et al, 2015; Zoschke et al, 2017). The transition from proplastids to chloroplasts is very quick and complex (Block et al, 2007; Woodson and Chory, 2008; Pogson et al, 2015; Bölter, 2018; Zoschke and Bock, 2018), and the expression of genes from both plastid and nuclear genomes is sharply induced (Jiao et al, 2007; Chen et al, 2010; Jing and Lin, 2020), which poses a problem to study spatially and temporally coordinated expressions of these genes during the chloroplast biogenesis
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