抄録
The ionotropic glutamate receptor (iGluR) gene family has been widely studied in animals and is known to play a key role in excitatory neurotransmission and other neuronal processes. In tomato, since glutamate is a major free amino acid component in the ripe fruit, the identification and the characterization of glutamate-receptor-like genes is of great importance. In the present study, we identified 15 novel tomato GLR (SlGLR) gene family from tomato genome databases. We performed a phylogenetic analysis of SlGLRs in comparison with Arabidopsis AtGLRs and prokaryotic iGluRs. Our analysis suggested that SlGLR gene family could be classified into 3 clades and among them, 2 showed a high homology to the Arabidopsis clades II and III. In addition to conserved amino acid residues in both prokaryotic and eukaryotic iGluRs, we could also identify those conserved only in AtGLRs and SlGLRs. We conducted the first comprehensive mRNA expression analysis of the SlGLR gene family. The result of realtime RT-PCR revealed that each gene was differentially regulated in terms of organs (leaf, stem, root, flower and fruit) as well as fruit developmental stages.
