Book with abstracts from the COST Action 0905 meeting in ... - UMB

INVESTIGATIONS OF FERRITIN GENE EXPRESSION IN TWO
SOLANUM TUBEROSUM CULTIVARS DIFFERING IN TUBER IRON
CONTENT
Sylvain Legay, Danièle Evers
Centre de Recherche Public-Gabriel Lippmann
Department ‘Environment and Agro-biotechnologies’
41, rue du Brill
L-4422 Belvaux, Luxembourg
Keywords: ferritin, gene expression, iron, potato
Iron deficiency is the most important micronutrient deficiency in the world especially in
developing countries where more than 50% of the anemias are thought to be due to iron
deficiency. Potato is an important staple food and constitutes a good source of potassium
and vitamin C, but remains less valuable as a source of iron. Thus, iron biofortification of
potato tubers is a crucial strategy for these populations. Ferritin proteins are known to be
one of the main components of the iron transport and storage in plant. In potato, until now,
the involvement of ferritins in tuber iron accumulation has not been well described. The
present work aimed to study ferritin gene expression in tubers with low and high iron
content.
Two Solanum tuberosum cultivars (Princess and Amandine) were evaluated for the iron
content in tubers. In the peel, a higher iron content was observed in Princess (38.97µg/g
DW) compared to Amandine (29.82µg/g DW). In the flesh, this trend remained the same
with higher amounts (26.57µg/g DW) in Princess compared to 22.33µg/g DW in
Amandine.
Using an in silico approach, three different ferritin isoforms were isolated from the EST
databases and from each isoform, specific qPCR primers were designed. All the ferritin
isoforms were expressed in the tubers and seemed to be correlated with iron content.