Abstract
Japanese cultivated gentians naturally show blue flowers, but some pink-flowered cultivars have been bred using natural flower color mutants. The pink coloration in genitan was reported to be derived from the insertion of transposable elements (GsTRIM1 and dTgs1) into flavonoid 3',5' hydroxylase (F3'5'H) gene (Nakatsuka et al. 2006). In this study, we attempted to reveal the reasons responsible for two other pink-flowered genitan cultivar/lines. We tried to isolate and characterize the F3'5'H genomic and cDNA sequences from two pink-flowered gentians and one blue flowered gentian as a control. As the result, new two mutated F3'5'H loci were found in the pink gentian. One is the insertion of novel transposable element-like sequence (322 bp in length) into 1st intron, the other is a single base T-insertion into 1st exon of F3'5'H gene. The former induced mis-splicing and the latter caused frame shift mutation of F3'5'H gene. We found the revertant phenotype from pink to blue flowers in one pink gentian cultivar and the detailed analyses are now in progress.
Nakatsuka et al. (2006) Molecular Genetics and Genomics 275: 231-241.
