The 2012 ASHS Annual Conference

A good development of garlic bulbs and cloves differentiation require cold weather and short photoperiod at early development phases, followed by high temperatures and long photoperiods until the harvest; If cold requirements are not met, a high incidence of defects bulbs is observed. The mechanism by which the low environmental temperatures start molecular expressions of genes that lead to the bulb formation is not known. The objectives of this work were differentially to describe the transcriptome profile of garlic sprouts of cloves stored at 5 °C during five weeks and room temperature (RT) as well as to observe the plant developing and quality bulbs in both storage conditions. Two storage conditions were studied; i) garlic bulbs (cv. Coreano) stored at RT for two consecutive seasons  (2009–10 and 2010–11) (RTxRT) and ii) garlic bulbs stored for 5 weeks at 5 °C in both seasons (5x5). One cloves set of each condition storage were planted at Cosio Aguascalientes, Mexico to study their development in field. The DNAc 5x5 sprouts created a library of 85 clones whose bio informatics analysis showed 28 unigenes; 64.28% were stress response proteins, 14.28% were metabolism proteins, 10.71% structural proteins, 7.14% transcription factors and 3.57 % without homology. Differential hybridization of 5x5 and RTxRT libraries and its Southern analysis identified 48 constituent genes, 20 over expressed genes (eleven were phenyl alanine ammonium lyase isozymes and two related to fructans metabolism) and 17 repressed genes.  Plants from cloves stored at 5 °C ahead the harvest time 42 days in comparison with RT plants, but they had lower height, yield and leaves number but also low incidence of undifferentiated bulbs.