Molecular characterization and in silico expression analysis of a chalcone synthase gene family in Sorghum bicolor

Recent use of Sorghum bicolor as a target for grass genomics has presented new resources for gene discovery in novel metabolic pathways in Poaceae. Sorghum synthesizes a unique class of flavonoid phytoalexins, the 3-deoxyanthocyanidins, in response to fungal infection. The biosynthetic pathways for 3-deoxyflavonoids are largely uncharacterized but are known to involve transcriptional activation of chalcone synthase (CHS). CHS, or naringenin CHS, catalyses the formation of naringenin, the precursor for different flavonoids. We have isolated seven sorghum CHS genes, CHS1-7, from a genomic library on high-density filters. CHS1-7 are highly conserved and closely related to the maize C2 and Whp genes. Several of them are also linked in the genome. These findings suggest that they are the result of recent gene duplication events. Expression of the individual CHS genes was studied in silico by examination of expressed sequence tag (EST) data available in the public domain. Our analyses suggested that CHS1-7 were not differentially expressed in the various growth and developmental conditions represented by the cDNA libraries used to generate the EST data. However, we identified a CHS-like gene, CHS8, with significantly higher EST abundance in the pathogen-induced library. CHS8 shows only 81-82% identity to CHS1-7 and forms a distinct subgroup in our phylogenetic analysis. In addition, the active site region contains substitutions that distinguish CHS8 from naringenin CHS. We propose that CHS8 has evolved new enzymatic functions that are involved in the synthesis of defence-related flavonoids, such as the 3-deoxyanthocyanidins, during fungal infection. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.