Abstract
Plants have various color pigments. Many plants have fruits and flowers of vivid colors such as orange, red, purple and blue. Anthocyanins with anthocyanidins as aglycone are one group of plant pigments. Each type of anthocyanidins is determined by the substrate specificity of dihydroflavonol 4-reductase (DFR) in its biosynthetic pathway and has a major influence on the determination of plant color. We performed a phylogenetic analysis of DFR genes, which are key enzymes of this anthocyanidin biosynthesis pathway. We collected 170 DFR clones in various plants by browsing database (NCBI). The collected DFRs were classified into ten groups according tosequence similarity. The consensus sequences within each group were aligned, and amino acids involved in the responsible region for determination of the substrate specificity of DFR have been shown. In addition, DFR's intron sites were highly conserved. These results would be useful to unveil the relationship between DFR and plant pigments.
