Abstract:

Ramie [Boehmeria nivea (L.) Gaud] is one of the important fibre crops, but its deguming leads to severe environmental pollution, large energy consumption, and deteriorated fibre for spinning and so on. Pectin is one of the primary colloid matter in ramie bast, and UGlcAE gene is a key enzyme gene in biosynthesis of most polysaccharide component of pectin. To inhibit pectin biosynthesis by antisense RNA or RNAi technology, some important genes such as UGlcAE related to pectin biosynthesis must be researched firstly. In this study, the full-length sequence of UGlcAE gene was cloned successfully from ramie cultivar—Zhongzhu 1 using degenerate primer RT-PCR, RACE, and screening of full-length cDNA library. The cDNA sequence was 1 257 bp, with a 723 bp encoding region and encode 241 amino acids. The Real-time quantitative PCR analysis showed that UGlcAE mRNA accumulated abundantly most in root and UGlcAE expression in ramie tissues was root>leaf>bast>xylem. These results pave the way for regulating and controlling synthetic quantity of pectin by molecular biology method in our further research.

Key words: Ramie, Pectin, UGlcAE, Clone, Real-time quantitative PCR