Expression profile of three genes involved in terpene biosynthesis in Lavandula angustifolia cultivars

The Lavandula species are economically important plants cultivated for their essential oils with many therapeutic properties resulting from the biological activity of certain oil constituents.

The study to characterize the 1-Deoxy-D-xylulose-5-phosphate synthase (DXS) which catalyzes the first step of the plastidial methylerythritol phosphate (MEP) pathway for the production of most essential oil constituents and two other genes such as borneol dehydrogenase (BDH) which generates camphor through the oxidation of borneol and linalool synthase (LINS) that produces linalool by expression as genes involved in major terpene biosynthesis in four different lavender cultivars (‘Provence Blue’, ‘Sevtopolis’, ‘Vera’ and ‘Codreanca’) of the Lavandula angustifolia species by quantitative Real-Time PCR.

Total RNA was isolated from leaf tissue using SV Total RNA Isolation System kit (Promega). The transcriptional activity of BDH, DXS and LINS in leaf tissue was analyzed by absolute quantification, based on ”in house” standards previously amplified using GoTaq G2 Green Master Mix (Promega) and specific primers targeting a 120–300 bp fragment size. The quantitative RT-PCR was performed in a Rotor-Gene 6000 5 Plex HRM Real-Time PCR system (Corbett) using a GoTaq 1-Step RT-qPCR kit (Promega).

The results show that while DXS was barely detected, BDH was heavily expressed in leaf tissue for all lavender cultivars and the linalool synthase was strongly expressed in the `Provence Blue`(PB) cultivar. The raw data does not indicate a direct correlation between the expression of the analyzed genes and further studies will be performed to elucidate the activation mechanism of terpene biosynthesis.