Publications by authors named "Ji-Ren Chen"

Lilium × formolongi is an important cut flower species that is able to flower within a year following seed propagation, with flower induction that is very sensitive to the photoperiod. Cryptochromes are blue/UV-A light receptors that regulate many important plant growth and development processes, including photoperiodic flowering. In this study, we isolated the cryptochrome 1 (CRY1) gene from L.

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The photoperiodic flowering pathway is essential for plant reproduction. As blue and ultraviolet-A light receptors, cryptochromes play an important role in the photoperiodic regulation of flowering. is an important cut flower that flowers within a year after seed propagation.

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We describe a new application of megaprimer polymerase chain reaction (PCR) for constructing a tandemly repeated DNA sequence using the drought responsive element (DRE) from Arabidopsis thaliana as an example. The key feature in the procedure was PCR primers with partial complementarity but differing melting temperatures (T(m)). The reverse primer had a higher T(m), a 3' end complementary to the DRE sequence and a 5' region complementary to the forward primer.

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Here we describe a rapid and efficient PCR-mediated ligation protocol for constructing a plant RNA interference vector to express long hairpin RNA (hpRNA). In the protocol, four oligonucleotide primers were used and three rounds of PCRs performed. The product of the first PCR was used as a megaprimer for the second PCR to generate a chimeric molecule with a gene-specific sequence and a spacer spliced together.

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Megaprimer-based methodology has been widely applied in site-directed mutagenesis, but rarely used in gene splicing. In this article, we describe a modification of the megaprimer PCR method, which can efficiently create and amplify a specific ligated chimeric gene segment in a PCR reaction and under a common PCR program that is widely used by researchers. More importantly, this modified method for splicing two or more gene fragments together revealed the mechanism of the megaprimer PCR method, by elucidating the key factor in the megaprimer-based protocol.

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