Isolation, cloning, and expression of five genes related to nitrogen metabolism in peach (Prunus persicaL. Batsch)

An optimal dosage of nitrogen has long been known to play important roles in governing nitrogen-use efficiency and improving the yield of plants. However, there is limited information on the isolation and expression profiles of genes related to nitrogen metabolism in peach (Prunus persica L. Batsch). This study isolated five genes involved in nitrogen metabolism and evaluated the effects of a single foliar application of urea on levels of expression of these genes in the leaves of ‘Dazhenbaochiyue’ peach. Cloning resulted in the isolation of 1,767, 1,236, 1,074, 1,758, and 2,721 nt-long cDNAs with full-length open reading frames encoding 588, 411, 357, 585, and 906 amino acids representing the asparagine synthetase (AS), glutamate dehydrogenase (GDH), glutamine synthetase (GS), nitrite reductase (NiR), and nitrate reductase (NR) genes in peach, respectively. An alignment of multiple amino acid sequences revealed that the AS, GDH, GS, and NR proteins in peach shared high levels of sequence conserva...