Cloning And Function Analysis Of A Homologous Gene ZEITLUPE Involed In Circadian Clock In Soybean

Plants have evolved several signaling pathways to sense and respond to their light environment. The absorption of light is accomplished by several photoreceptors. The signal of light is integrated to the internal body of plants to regulate gene expression, protein activation and physiological activity. One of important internal signaling is circadian clock entrained by photoreceptors in plants. The growing body of evidence indicates that photoperception and circadian clock affect the reproduction in plants. However, the precise steps in the pathway from photoreceptors to circadian clock and their effects in flowering are largely unknown.In Arabidopsis, several genes are identified in regulating the pathway from photoreceptors to circadian clock. Zeitlupe(ZTL) gene is well characterized in this pathway and plays important roles. For further understanding the interplay among photoreceptors, circadian clock and flowering, we studied ZTL gene in Glycine Max. The specific of this research was to isolate ZTL gene and explore its function in soybean. We found a high similarity of these two ZTL genes in amino acid sequence, especially some conserved domains. It was essential to find the location and fuction of ZTL in plants, so we constructed several plant expression vectors with Tobacco mosaic virus 35S promoter including 35S:: GmZTL1; 35S::Myc: GmZTL1; 35S::GFP:GmZTL135S:: GmZTL1:Myc; 35S:: GmZTL1:GFP. Transforming Arabidopsis with plant vectors , overexpression GmZTL gene delayed the time of flowering. Moreover, we have found lots of evidence which indicated GmZTL played the same function. All of this helped to widen our views about the mechanisms of photoperiod and circadian clock.