How Exogenous Selenium Affects Anthocyanin Accumulation and Biosynthesis-Related Gene Expression in Purple Lettuce

We studied the effects of selenite on growth and anthocyanin accumulation in purple lettuce. The results will ascertain which selenite concentration is more advantageous to the purple lettuce and help study the effect of selenite on the molecular mechanism of plant anthocyanin accumulation using the quantitative reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). In this study, the low selenite concentrations (<= 8 mu M) could not only promote purple lettuce growth including plant height, leaf area (LA), and fresh weight (FW), but also the anthocyanin contents which may be due to how the selenite affects the UDP-glycose flavonoid glycosyl transferase (UFGT) and flavanone 3-hydroxylase (F3H) genes expression of anthocyanin biosynthesis. Next, on the basis of the obtained results from the preliminary experiments, 8 jiM selenite was used to analyze the anthocyanin accumulation with the treatment time prolonged. Although the anthocyanin content of purple lettuce was not reduced on day 24, the control plants were significantly decreased. The reason may be that compared with the control plants, UFGT and F3H genes were markedly up-regulated on day 24. Therefore, the influence of selenium on anthocyanin accumulation and molecular regulation of anthocyanin synthesis is mainly due to the expression levels of the F3H and UFGT gene. It needs to be a further studied.