Authors: Fatima AlejosGonzalez Guosheng Qu LiLi Zhou Carole H Saravitz Janet L Shurtleff DeYu Xie
Publish Date: 2011/05/26
Volume: 234, Issue: 4, Pages: 685-697
Abstract
Artemisia annua L is the only natural resource that produces artemisinin Qinghaosu an endoperoxide sesquiterpene lactone used in the artemisinincombination therapy of malaria The crosshybridization properties of A annua do not favor studying artemisinin biosynthesis To overcome this problem in this study we report on selection of selfpollinated A annua plants and characterize their development and artemisinin biosynthesis Selfpollinated F2 plants selected were grown under optimized growth conditions consisting of long day 16 h of light and short day 9 h of light exposures in a phytotron The life cycles of these plants were approximately 3 months long and final heights of 30–35 cm were achieved The leaves on the main stems exhibited obvious morphological changes from indented single leaves to odd pinnately compound leaves Leaves and flowers formed glandular and Tshaped trichomes on their surfaces The glandular trichome densities increased from the bottom to the top leaves High performance liquid chromatography–mass spectrometrybased metabolic profiling analyses showed that leaves flowers and young seedlings of F2 plants produced artemisinin In leaves the levels of artemisinin increased from the bottom to the top of the plants showing a positive correlation to the density increase of glandular trichomes RTPCR analysis showed that progeny of selfpollinated plants expressed the amorpha4 11diene synthase ADS and cytochrome P450 monooxygenase 71 AV1 CYP71AV1 genes which are involved in artemisinin biosynthesis in leaves and flowers The use of selfpollinated A annua plants will be a valuable approach to the study of artemisinin biosynthesisWe thank the North Carolina Biotechnology Center for providing this research grant Grant 55031 to support the genetic engineering of the artemisinin research We give our special gratitude to Dr George Yatskievych from Missouri Herbarium at Missouri Botanical Garden for his kind help to collect Artemisia annua seeds We thank Dr Valerie Knowlton from the Center for Electron Microscopy for her kind help in preparing the SEM
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