Abstract

Nitric oxide (NO) is a bioactive and multifunctional gaseous molecule signal that plays a crucial role in stress responses and mediates a variety of physiological processes in plant. Previous studies indicate that NO can reduce stress damage via regulating the activities of antioxidant enzymes including glutathione reductase (GR). In order to analyze the potential effect of cucumber GR activity on NO application prior to cold treatment, full length of GR sequence was obtained by rapid amplification of cDNA ends (RACE), and its expression was characterized by northern blot. The GR gene in cucumber is 1995 bp (accession number: GU248528) in length, including one open reading frame encoding 496 amino acids. The GR sequence in cucumber shares a high similarity with those from other plant species at the polypeptide level. Northern blot analysis indicates that the GR expression is up-regulated under NO treatments before chilling stress in cucumber leaves.

Key words: Cucumber, gene expression, glutathione reductase, low temperature stress, nitric oxide.

Abbreviation

Abbreviations: GSH, glutathione; GSSG, oxidized glutathione; NO, nitric oxide;RACE, rapid amplification of cDNA ends.