Isolation and Characterization of Anthocyanin 5-O-Glucosyltransferase in Perilla frutescens var. cri

The glucosylation of 5-position of anthocyanin molecules is one of most important modification step, which is responsible for the stability and color hue of anthocyanin molecules. However, anthocyanin 5-O -glucosyltransferase (5-GT) is unstable and it had been difficult to purify this enzyme by biochemical methods. The isolation of cDNA encoding 5-GT was succeeded first by mRNA differential display (DD) of red and green chemotypes of Perilla frutescens var. crispa . The full-length cDNA was isolated by the screening of perilla cDNA library with cDNA fragments, which was displayed specifically in red perilla. The biological characters of this enzyme were investigated by using the recombinant protein expressed in yeast. We have shown an example of the application of DD technique to the molecular biology in plant secondary metabolisms.