Date of Completion

Spring 5-1-2014

Thesis Advisor(s)

Wolf-Dieter Reiter

Honors Major

Molecular and Cell Biology

Disciplines

Biochemistry | Molecular Biology

Abstract

The genome of Arabidopsis thaliana contains several coding regions for UDP-arabinopyranose mutases (UAMs) that are also known as reversibly glycosylated polypeptides (RGPs). The mur5 cell wall mutant of Arabidopsis shows a 30% decrease in cell wall arabinose content, and a missense mutation in the Reversibly Glycosylated Polypeptide 2 gene was recently proposed to cause this mutant phenotype. Through a traditional complementation analysis, mur5 and a T-DNA insertion mutant in the RGP2 gene were shown not to complement each other, indicating that the two genes are mutant alleles of the same locus. The mur5 SNP located in RGP2 caused a more severe arabinose deficiency than the gene disruption in the T-DNA insertion line, which could be explained by the operation of a subunit poisoning mechanism in the mur5 mutant. Transcriptional analysis indicated that RGP2 and its paralog RGP1 were regulated independently of one another despite having identical functions and cell localization.

Download

Share

COinS