Cloning and expression analysis of APETALA2 gene from grapevine (Vitus vinifera) based on EST database.

APETALA2(AP2)plays an important role in Arabidopsis development,especially in the development of flower or-gans.Based on the relative conservation of plant homologous genes,a full-length Vitis vinifera homologue of AP2(Vv-AP2) was bioinformatically cloned in this study.Accordingly,the 5’-and 3’-end sequences were obtained from cDNA of flower of Xiang yue grapevine cultivar by 3’RACE and specific PCR with two gene-specific primers designed against the Vv-AP2 se-quence,based on the full length cDNA of Vv-AP2(2 208 bp) which was spliced.This Vv-AP2 cDNA included an open reading frame(ORF)of 1 536 nucleotides,5’-untranslated region(UTR) of 268 bp,and 3'-UTR of 376 bp.The 3’-UTR contains a Poly +(A) of 28 bp.The sequence has been deposited in GenBank database with the accession number of FJ809943.The deduced amino acid sequence of Vv-AP2 includes 551 amino acids,contains a putative nuclear localization signal sequence(KKSR) and two highly conserved AP2 domains.The semi-quantitative RT-PCR and SYBR Green I Real-time qRT-PCR were employed to analyze the expression of Vv-AP2 in different organs of grapevine and the result showed that Vv-AP2 is expressed in much higher level in inflorescence and flower than that in leaf and stem.