The effects of reciprocal cross on inheritance of DNA methylation in cotton (<i>Gossypium hirsutum</i>)

Abstract

DNA methylation plays an important role for regulation of gene expression. To study the inheritance of DNA methylation, we selected two F₁ plant population by reciprocal cross with two cotton lines Zongcaixuan No.1 and HY428, and analyzed the variations of DNA methylation levels and patterns in F₁ generations by methylation sensitive amplified fragment length polymorphism (MSAP) technique with 54 primer combinations. The results show that most cytosine methylated patterns are conservatively inherited from parents. The numbers of variant sites are less in F₁ generation. According to the number of sites individually inherited from female and male parents, the different choice of female and male parents made a big distinction between the sites inherited from female parent and the sites inherited from the male parent. For reciprocal cross F113 and F132, the number for sites of cytosine methylation patterns inherited from the female parent are far more than that from the male parent, which may be closely related to cytoplasmic inheritance.

Key words: Methylation sensitive amplified fragment length polymorphism (MSAP), DNA methylation, cytoplasmic inheritance, reciprocal cross, cotton.