A Cucumber AGAMOUS-LIKE 15 (AGL15) MADS-Box Gene Mediates Abnormal Leaf Morphology in <i>Arabidopsis</i>

Abstract

The AGL15 subfamily MADS-box proteins play vital roles in various developmental processes, such as floral transition, somatic embryogenesis, and leaf and fruit development. In this work, an AtAGL15 ortholog, CsMADS26, was cloned from cucumber (Cucumis sativus L.). The open reading frame (ORF) of CsMADS26 is 669 bp in length, encoding a predicted protein of 222 amino acids. The CsMADS26 protein contains a highly conserved MADS-box domain and a variable C domain, as well as less conserved I and K domains. Phylogenetic relationship analysis revealed that CsMADS26 was clustered into the AGL15 clade of AGL15 subfamily. Expression analysis based on qRT-PCR showed that CsMADS26 is mainly expressed in reproductive organs including flowers and fruits. Transgenic Arabidopsis plants with ectopic expression of CsMADS26 exhibited curled rosette and cauline leaves, and the leaf size was much smaller than that of wild-type (WT) plants. These results provide clues for the functional characterization of CsMADS26 in the future.

Keywords

• cucumber
• MADS-box
• AGAMOUS-LIKE 15 (AGL15)
• transgenic <i>Arabidopsis</i>
• curled leaf
• leaf size