Abstract
Many living organisms produce small antimicrobial peptides to protect their tissues from infectious microbial agents. Plant defensins are small, highly stable, cysteine-rich antimicrobial proteins that are thought to constitute an important component of plant defense against fungal pathogens. There are a number of such defensins expressed in various plant tissues with differing antifungal activity and spectrum.
We have previously reported the isolation and characterization of broad-spectrum antifungal defensin (BJ-AFP1) from Brassica juncea. Apart from the BJ-AFP1, an increasing number of BJ-AFP-like proteins leads to understand the relation between anti-microbial activity and structure of the BJ-AFP-like proteins. Therefore, we tried to gain a gene coding BJ-AFP-like protein from Brassica juncea.
In this study, we report the cloning of defensin DNAs from total DNA of Brassica juncea and the measurement of anti-microbial assay to several microorganisms.
