玉米expansin家族胚乳特异表达基因鉴定及zmexpb13功能分析-identification of endosperm-specific expression genes in maize expan sin family and functional analysis of zm expb 13.docx

AbstractAs one of the most important food crops, maize serves not only as food for human beings and animals, but also as important raw material for industrial production. One goal for breeders and molecular biologists is to breed high-yield and high-quality maize. To improve the seed size is considered crucial to increase maize yield, which is decided jointly by the size and number of the cell, therefore, an effective way to improve maize production is to increase the cell size. Previous studies showed that activiating the loosening of cell wall is quite significant in regulating and controlling the cell size. Nowadays, researches focus on applying the technology of excessive expression to genetic improvement of crops. Since endosperm is an important component of seed, breeders and molecular biologists try hard to make clear the development of its cells, which is important to breed high-yield and high-quality maize, therefore, to discover the important functional gene which influence the size of endosperm cell of maize is an effective way to increase maize production. By employing the means of bioinformatics, this study did gene identification of expansin famiy of maize, make analysis of its structural features, evolutionary relationship, etc, and by studying the expression patterns of these genes, discovering the specific expression gene of endosperm, and meanwhile studing the influence of ZmEXPB13 on seed size by way of over-expression, and make preliminary research on the mechanism of action of expansin gene, the author has some conclusions as follows:By Blast homology search, we identified 88 expansin protein sequences from the genome database of B73, and divided them into three sub-families as EXPA, EXPB, and EXPLA. Analysis on gene structure and sequence feature shows that the gene sequence of maize is actually highly conservative. Physical positoning of Chromosome shows that the distributions of all the 88 genes on 10 Chromosomes are random except the eighth