BADH genes in wheat and their expression

Betaine aldehyde dehydrogenase (BADH) is important enzyme which plays a dual role in cereals. It acts as an osmoprotectant and has an important role during abiotic stress. In addition it also influences the fragrance in rice. Therefore, this gene has both agronomical and breeding values. An 8pb deletion in exon 7 cause a premature termination codon in BADH2 resulting a mutate badh2 allele; which ultimately elevates the level of 2AP leading fragrance in fragrant rice (Bradbury et al., 2008). Unlike rice wheat is a hexaploid and has two BADH homologs i.e. BADH1 and BADH2. Our genomic data shows that there are three alleles for BADH homologs. One allele is present in the progenitors and these indicates that, these allele is inheritate from each of the progenitors during polyploidy in hexaploid wheat. Our data show that a total of 4 and 14 SNPs are present among the genomes in BADH2 and BADH1respectivly. Investigation on two different tissues (i.e. leaves and seeds), at two different time point (i.e. 14 DPA and 30 DPA) of four different varieties from different geographical locations, resulted no bias among the genomes and clearly shows genome A is being expressed in all these varieties. These both homologs of BADH are expressed in all of the varieties and the expression of BADH2 was found same in all. However in the varieties, a total of 8 SNPs were found in the 4 exons of BADH1. Hence, except one variety there is no change in the amino acid level where threonine is replaced with proline.