Project description:Rhododendron is well known woody plant, as having high ornamental and economic values. Heat stress is one of the important environmental stresses that effects Rhododendron growth. Recently, melatonin was reported to alleviate abiotic stress in plants. However, the role of melatonin in Rhododendron is still unknown. In the present study, the effect of melatonin on Rhododendron under heat stress and the potential mechanism was investigated. Through morphological characterization and chlorophyll a fluorescence analysis, 200µM was selected for the best melatonin concentration to mitigate heat stress in Rhododendron. To reveal the mechanism of melatonin priming alleviating the heat stress, the photosynthesis indexes, Rubisco activity and ATP content were detected in 25 ℃, 35 ℃ and 40 ℃. The results showed that melatonin improves electron transport rate (ETR), PSII and PSI activity, Rubisco activity and ATP content under high temperature stress. Furthermore, transcriptome analysis showed that a significant enrichment of differentially expressed genes in the photosynthesis pathway, and most of genes in photosynthesis pathway displayed a more significantly slight down-regulation under high temperature stress in melatonin-treatment plants, compared with melatonin-free plants. We identified PGR5……Together, these results demonstrate that melatonin could promote the photosynthetic electron transport, improve the enzymes activities in Calvin cycle and the production of ATP, and thereby increase photosynthetic efficiency and CO2 assimilation capacity under heat stress, through regulating the expression of some key genes, such as PGR5…Therefore, melatonin application displayed great potential to cope with the heat stress in Rhododendron.
Project description:A comparative genomic approach was used to identify large sequence polymorphisms among Mycobacterium avium isolates obtained from a variety of host species. DNA microarrays were used as a platform for comparing mycobacteria field isolates with the sequenced bovine isolate Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis (Map) K10. ORFs were classified as present or divergent based on the relative fluorescent intensities of the experimental samples compared to Map K10 DNA. Map isolates cultured from cattle, bison, sheep, goat, avian, and human sources were hybridized to the Map microarray. Three large deletions were observed in the genomes of four Map isolates obtained from sheep and four clusters of ORFs homologous to sequences in the Mycobacterium avium subsp. avium (Maa) 104 genome were identified as being present in these isolates. One of these clusters encodes glycopeptidolipid biosynthesis enzymes. One of the Map sheep isolates had a genome profile similar to a group of Mycobacterium avium subsp. silvaticum (Mas) isolates which included four independent laboratory stocks of the organism traditionally identified as Maa strain 18. Genome diversity in Map appears to be mostly restricted to large sequence polymorphisms that are often associated with mobile genetic elements. Keywords: Comparative genomic hybridization