Gene Isolation and Expression Analysis of NtERD1 Induced by PVY in Tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum L.)

Abstract: A 745 bp EST was obtained from the tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum L.) suppression subtractive hybridization (SSH) library induced by PVY (potato virus Y), using SSH and cDNA chip technologies. Sequence alignments with Blast indicated that the EST revealed a high degree of similarity with other members of the plant early responsive to dehydration (ERD) genes in both nucleic and amino acid levels. The cDNA contained an open reading frame (ORF) of 492 bp consisting of 163 amino acids. Amino acid Blastp indicated that the predicted protein had a high degree of homology with other ERD proteins. Thus the new gene screened belongs to tobacco ERD genes and was named as NtERD1 (GenBank accession no.GU144573). The results of real-time PCR showed that NtERD1 was up-regulated in leaves infected with PVY in early stage. Therefore NtERD1 was induced by PVY infection and might play important roles in tobacco resistance to viruses.