The plant hormone abscisic acid has huge economic
potential and can be applied in agriculture and forestry
for it is considered to be involved in plant resistance to
stresses such as cold, heat, salinity, drought, pathogens
and wounding. Now overproducing strains of
Botrytis cinerea
are used for biotechnological production of
abscisic acid. An LTR retrotransposon,
Boty-aba, and a
solo LTR were identified by
in silico genomic sequence
analysis, and both were detected within the abscisic acid
gene cluster in
B. cinerea B05.10, but not in
B. cinerea
SAS56.
Boty-aba contains a pair of LTRs and two
internal genes. The LTRs and the first gene have
features characteristic of
Ty3/gypsy LTR
retrotransposons. The second gene is a novel gene,
named
brtn, which encodes for a protein (named BRTN)
without putative conserved domains. The impressive
divergence in structure of the abscisic acid gene clusters
putatively gives new clues to investigate the divergence
in the abscisic acid production yields of different
B. cinerea strains.
