Abstract
Tomato and Arabidopsis differ morphologically and genetically in the course of evolution. We previously demonstrated that tomato has numbers of genes that have low similarity to Arabidopsis genes by analyzing full-length cDNAs of miniature tomato Micro-Tom. In this study, we focused on functional analysis of these tomato genes using virus-induced gene silencing (VIGS) to obtain insights into molecular bases of plant diversity. We obtained Micro-Tom full length cDNA sequences from tomato databases MiBASE and KaFTom. And then, 85 full-length cDNA clones that have low similarity (>1e-10) to Arabidopsis genes at amino acid sequence level were selected for VIGS assay. Partial sequences of these cDNAs were inserted into tobacco rattle virus-based VIGS vector, and then VIGS in Micro-Tom plant was induced by agro-infiltration. By agro-infiltration to cotyledon, gene silencing was induced not only in leaves, but also in fruit. We report examples of morphological changes seen in VIGS-induced tomato plants.
