Abstract
Progesterone is an animal steroid hormone which maintains pregnancy. We have already identified progesterone from various plants and found that progesterone is a ubiquitous steroid in plants.
We isolated three genes from Arabidopsis and rice, respectively, analogous to human progesterone-binding protein genes, and designated AtPB1-3 and OsPB1-3. These genes ubiquitously expressed among various organs in both Arabidopsis and rice, which suggests that progesterone and both AtPB and OsPB genes may have any biological function in plants. Rice solution culture containing various concentration of progesterone was performed to explore the biological effect of progesterone. Some obvious growth characters, such as an inhibition in a concentration of 100μM progesterone, were observed.
At present, we are examining the quantitative analysis of endogenous progesterone and the expression analysis of OsPB genes in different growth stages of rice panicle to reveal the effect of progesterone for reproductive growth in plant.
