Semi-quantitative expression studies of genes involved in biosynthesis of curcuminoid in <i>Curcuma caesia</i> Roxb.

Abstract

The development of functional genomics, proteomics, metabolomics and bioinformatics tools has given a new facet to plant secondary metabolites study. The biosynthetic pathway involved in the curcuminoids formation was not clear for the long time. The development of turmeric EST database by David Gang's group has formed a landmark for elucidating curcuminoids biosynthetic pathway in <i>Curcuma longa </i> and other species of the genus. The present study reports on the expression profiling of genes involved in curcuminoids synthesis in <i>C. caesia</i> Roxb. The study involved primer designing from EST/CDS regions of the major genes (CURS, CURS2, CURS3, DCS & CHS1) involved in curcuminoids synthesis, RNA extraction from rhizome (5- month & 10-month-old) and leaves of the plant, cDNA preparation and semi-quantitative expression studies of genes. All the genes showed higher expression in rhizome compared to leaves and, among all the genes, CURS showed maximum expression, followed by DCS, CHS1, CURS2 and least by CURS3. The 5-month-old rhizome showed four-fold higher CURS expression as compared to the 10-month-old. Overexpressing this selective gene in <i>in vitro</i> culture by elicitation can help in up scaling the bioactive compound in this plant species.