Determination of genetic diversity of Turkish sesamum (Sesamum indicum L.) by using AFLP markers

Thesis (Master)--Izmir Institute of Technology, Molecular Biology and Genetics, Izmir, 2011Includes bibliographical references (leaves: 32-35)Text in English; Abstract: Turkish and Englishix, 35 leavesSesame (Sesamum indicum L.) belongs to the Pedaliaceae family. It is an important oil seed crop which is cultivated in tropical and subtropical areas of Asia and Africa. China is the largest producer of sesame seed in the world while Turkey ranks seventh and produces 21036 tonnes of sesame seed in a year. Although sesame's edible seed and high quality seed oil are important for both humans and the economy, there is not enough information about the sesame genome in the literature. Our aim was to determine the diversity of 158 Turkish sesame accessions by using the AFLP marker system and to design a new set of sesame-specific SSR markers from genomic sequence of S. indicum. The Turkish sesame accessions were tested with five AFLP primer combinations, as a result, 148 polymorphic fragments were obtained. The maximum similarity was 57% for the accessions and a good level of diversity was present in the sesame germplasm. Secondly, a genomic library of sesame was constructed. A total of 1.094.317 reads were obtained and 702.371 of them were clustered to 140.669 reads containing 93.365 nucleotides. A total of 3101 primer pairs were developed from flanking regions of SSRs with primers for dinucleotide (36,4%), tetranucleotide (29,3%), trinucleotide (23,1%), pentanucleotide (7,1%), and hexanucleotide (4,2%) repeats. These primers are the first genomic-SSR markers developed for sesame cultivars. SSRs have good reproducibility, high genome coverage, co-dominant inheritance, good transferability to close species and are multiallelic. The designed genomic-SSRs should be very useful for sesame mapping and diversity studies

Common principles of olfactory coding across olfactory receptor families and species

Beside vision and hearing, the chemoreception is one of the important senses for organisms in an aquatic environment. To detect food, predators or sexual partners a broad variation of different receptors in the nose of an animal is needed. Therefore, coding strategy of the olfactory receptors is the formation of spatial distribution patterns in order to maintain their continued function in the event of damage to the epithelium. This work focused on the visualization of individual receptors and receptor families of different aquatic animals in the olfactory epithelium and for this, among other things, expression and spatial distribution were investigated. Here it could be shown, that the recently discovered adenosine receptor A2c is expressed in the eel, carp and claw frog in a sparse and distributed pattern within their olfactory epithelium similar to the pattern observed for zebrafish. A sharp contrast is formed by the expression of A2c in lamprey, because of A2c-expressing cells forming a contiguous domain directly adjacent to the sensory region. In addition it was shown, that this expression is consistent, with the expression in neuronal progenitor cells. It could be that A2c switched the function during evolution in the lineage of vertebrates. Also for the first time, the expression pattern of three of six possible V1R receptors, and the absence of two possible V1R and two V2R receptors in adult Lampetra fluviatilis was demonstrated. It was shown that the three V1Rs form different expression zones, when looking at the height in the lamella. Here we also completed a project to investigate the spatial distribution of the complete V1R-related Oras receptor family in zebrafish. It was shown, that each of the ora genes had its own expression zone