Monitoring of Gene Expression Profiles and Identification of Candidate Genes Involved in Drought Tolerance in Festuca Mairei with cDNA-AFLP

Drought stress is one of the most complex environmental constraints on plants. Response of plant to drought stress is manifested by various changes in physiological and metabolic processes, which are reflected at the molecular level. cDNA-amplified fragment length polymorphism (cDNA-AFLP) is a high-throughput transcript profiling technique for temporal and spatial gene expression analysis (Bachem et al., 1996). To understand the molecular genetic basis of drought tolerance of grasses, we applied the cDNA-AFLP procedure to identify the genes responding to drought stress of Festuca mairei (Fm), which showed a xeriphytic adaptation (Marlatt et al., 1997)