Plant & Animal Genomes XVII Conference

January 10-14, 2009
Town & Country Convention Center
San Diego, CA

Apomixis In St. John’s Wort (Hypericum perforatum L.): Recent Findings And Future Perspectives

Giulio Galla¹ , Anna Schallau² , Tim Francis Sharbel² , Helmut Baumlein² , Gianni Barcaccia¹

¹  Dipartimento di Agronomia Ambientale e Produzioni Vegetali, Università di Padova, Viale dell’Università 16, 35020 Legnaro (Padova), Italy

²  Apomixis Research Group, Department of Cytogenetics, Institut für Pflanzengenetik und Kulturpflanzenforshung, Corrensstrasse 3, 06466 Gatersleben, Germany

St. John’s wort (Hypericum perforatum L.) is a medicinal plant that produces pharmaceutically important metabolites with antidepressive, anticancer and antiviral activities. It is also regarded as a serious weed in many countries. Wild populations are composed of diploid sexual or polyploid (mostly tetraploid, i.e. 2n=4x=32) pseudogamous facultative apomicts. Recent research has shown that H. perforatum is an attractive model system for the study of apomixis, as it is characterized by a relatively small genome size, a versatile mode of reproduction ranging from complete sexuality to nearly obligate apomixis, and a relatively short generation time. A better understanding of its reproductive and inheritance patterns is required to facilitate the identification of factors associated with apomixis, if these traits are to ever benefit agriculture. Our presentation reviews novel cyto-histological findings that shed light on apomixis as a whole in St. John’s wort, and includes an overview of the main tools that have been and are being used to investigate apospory and parthenogenesis within this system. Recent results on segregation and expression patterns of candidate genes for apomixis are also presented and future perspectives are critically discussed.