Mitragyna speciosa is rich in secondary metabolites which are similar in effects as opium. Treatment with plant growth regulator such as salicylic acid (SA) is able to increase plant defense mechanism which later induces the expression of genes that encode secondary metabolite production. To identify genes that respond to elicitation of high concentration of SA, suppression subtractive hybridiz...

CAD (EC 1.1.1.195) catalyzes the reduction of cinnamyl aldehydes to produce p-coumaryl, coniferyl, and sinapyl alcohols, which constitute the precursors for lignin biosynthesis. Antisense inhibition of CAD activity in tobacco (Nicotiana tabacum) resulted in altered lignin composition, demonstrating that the enzyme is a useful target for manipulation of lignification (Halpin et al., 1994). CAD a...

CAD (EC 1.1.1.195) catalyzes the conversion of cinnamaldehydes to the corresponding alcohols, the final step in the biosynthesis of the lignin precursors. CAD is considered one of the target enzymes for the modification of lignin biosynthesis (Whetten and Sederoff, 1991). This enzyme has been purified and characterized from severa1 plant species. cDNAs of CAD-encoding genes have been cloned fro...

To elucidate the genetic and biochemical regulation of elicitor-induced p-coumaraldehyde accumulation in plants, we undertook a multifaceted approach to characterize the metabolic flux through the phenylpropanoid pathway via the characterization and chemical analysis of the metabolites in the p-coumaryl, coniferyl, and sinapyl alcohol branches of this pathway. Here, we report the identification...

In this study, the entire gene encoding cinnamyl alcohol dehydrogenase in kenaf (HcCAD2) was cloned and characterized. CAD is a key enzyme in the last step of lignin biosynthesis. The full-length HcCAD ortholog is composed of a 1,074-bp open reading frame (ORF) encoding 357 amino acids (KM044582). BlastP and a phylogenetic study revealed that the deduced amino acid sequences share the highest s...