Amplifikasi dan Karakterisasi In Silico Daerah Pengapit Ujung 5’ Gen APETALA1 Kakao (Theobroma cacao L.)

Abstract

Cacao is one of important export comodities in Indonesia but its productivity is still in low category. The long juvenile phase is one of the cause of low productivity of cacao plantations. The effort to increase productivity drives on cacao studies of molecular flowering gene. In Arabidopsis, APETALA1 functions in earlier developmental stages in determination of the floral meristem identity and one of flowering identity genes that determines the formation of sepal and petal tissues. The purposes of the research are to amplify 5’-flanking regions APETALA1 gene from cacao (Theobroma cacao L.) and analyse its promoter characteristic. Amplification of 5’-flanking regions APETALA1 gene using Thermal Asymmetric Interlaced-PCR (TAIL-PCR) technique shows that spesific primer and arbitrary primer pairs can amplify the flanking region. Futhermore this fragment were transformed at competent cell E. Coli XL-1 Blue by using pGEMT Easy vector. The result of bioinformatic analysis using online promoter analysis software softberry shows undiscovered TATA box/enhancer on the amplified sequence and it contains 11 motifs of plant functional promoter element. Further analysis indicated that the amplified sequence belong to TATA-less promoter group with core motif microsatellite (CG)