Abstract
Boron deficiency causes various symptoms such as growth suppression and unusual development. Recently, we reported the adapted mechanism for boron deficiency by using poplar cells grown in 5 μM boron concentration medium (1/20-B). In this cells, pectin methylesterase (PME) activity was higher than that of non-resistant cells maintained under 100 μM boron condition (1/1-B). This result indicates that the increase of the activity may play a part of the mechanism in tolerance to boron deficiency.
In this study, I tried to clone a PME gene to elucidate the relationship between tolerance to boron deficiency and increase of PME activity. Single strand cDNA templates were synthesized from mRNAs prepared from 1/1-B and 1/20-B cells. Partial cDNAs encoding PME were amplified by PCR from those templates with primers designed from conserved nucleotide sequence regions in poplar PMEs. The clones obtained from each cell were identical and determined as the pme1 gene.
