Abstract:

The purposes of this paper was to obtain tyrosine aminotransferase (TAT) gene involved in rosmarinic acid (RA) biosynthesis pathway from Perilla frutescens. According to a parallel analysis of the amino acid sequence of TAT genes from other species, degenerate primers were designed and the fragment of TAT gene in Perilla frutescens was successfully cloned by homology cloning method (GenBank accession No. JN032113.1), and gene fragment was 579 bp encoding 193 amino acid protein. Sequence alignment revealed that the deduced amino acid sequence of PfTAT was 97%, 94%, 69% and 58% identical to Coleus blumei, Salvia miltiorrhiza, Arabidopsis thaliana and Papaver somniferum, respectively. Phylogenetic tree analysis showed that PfTAT had the closest relationship with Lamiaceae plants. The PfTAT expressed in all the tested tissues but at different levels with higher expression in leaf using the semi-quantitative RT-PCR analysis. Further expression analysis reveals that the signaling components such as abscisic acid (ABA) and salicylic acid (SA) up-regulate the PfTAT transcript levels in different degree.