The Analysis Of Three Key Genes Involved In The Biosynthesis Pathway Of Artemisinin And Artemisinin Expression Patterns In Artemisia Annua L.

Artemisinin is a new active antimalarial drug which is extracted from Artemisia annua L.by the researchers of our country in1970s, and it is a sesquiterpene lactone with an endoperoxide brigde. At present, it is widly used to treat malarial, especially chloroquine-resistant and chloroquinine-sensitive. For the past few years, it was founded that Artemisinin could not only to resist parasites, including plasmodium, hematophagia and so on, but also to eliminate inflammation, immunological regulation, reject tumor and so on. So far, Artemisinin is almost extraced from A. annua L., but the content of Artemisinin in A. annua L. was so low that the supply of Artemisinin is unable to meet the market demand. As a resuilt, lots of scientists are engaged in improving the production of Artemisinin. With the development of the research for the biosynthesis pathway of Artemisinin, the method that to improve the production with the technology of transgene is thought to be the most effective method. Researches on the biosynthesis pathway of Artemisinin suggested that using metabolic engineering to improve the production of Artemisinin in A. annua L. is a very promising way.In our present work, we extracted the artemisinin from young leaf, old leaf, young branch, old branch, young stem, old stem and root from three plants of A. annua L with similar morphology in garden and determined by HPLC-ELSD. At the same time, the total RNA isolated from the tissues mentioned above was used to check the expression pattern of three genes-CYP71,CPR and AAR involved in the biosynthesis pathway of Artemisinin. Data indicated that the content of Artemisinin had current relationship with the expression of the three genes. The content of Artemisinin in different tissues was as a list like bellow:young leaf> old leaf> young branch> old branch> young stem> old stem> root with the same trend of genes in our work. As described by others, the Artemisinin was mainly synthesized in glandular trichomes which only exists in young leaves while not in roots. However, we actually found sprinkle Artemisinin in roots suggests there is transportation of Artemisinin after its biosynthesis.