Investigation of seed storage proteins (albumin, globulin, prolamin and glutelin) in some Lathyrus L. species growing in Turkey by SDS-PAGE method

Alike other genus belong to Fabaceae, Lathyrus seeds have a high protein content and accumulate large amounts of proteins during their development. Most of these proteins don?t have catalytic activity, serve to provide amino acids for use during germination and seed growth. These seed proteins termed ?storage proteins?. Seed storage proteins are highly stable, unaffected by environmental conditions and easly to handle. Therefore seed proteins have extensive attention in several literatures and electrophoretic techniques for total seed protein analysis have been recognized as a important source of taxonomic evidences and were used to adress genetic relationships at the generic and specific levels. In this thesis total seventeen taxa collected from different regions of Turkey have been studied for the analysis of seed storage protein subfraction profiles to examine their genetic relationship by using sodium dodecyl sulphate polyacrilamyde gel electrophoresis technique (SDS-PAGE). Seed coats were removed prior to extraction and cotyledons were obtained. These were homogenised in four different solution to obtain seed protein subfractions and then protein amounts of every subfractions were quantified. Electrophoretic data were determined by using a gel documentation system and analysed by Quantity 1-D analysis software and also dendograms were formed in UPGAMA. All studied taxa of genus Lathyrus L. sections Orobus, Platystylis, Pratensis, Orobon, Lathyrus and Orobastrum cluster together on the basis of seed protein similarities as designed by previous morphological classification. One of the prominent result is albumin and globulin A quantities of L. brachypterus var. brachypterus (3.495 ?g/ml and 2.752 ?g/ml respectively) which is endemic for Turkey and polyploidy (2n:28) were low. This could be because of gene silencing of albumin and globulin A being quite low. Other important result of this thesis is similarity of glutelin band patterns with globulin B band patterns in studied Lathyrus taxa. Key words: Lathyrus, Seed storage proteins, albumins, globulins, prolamins, glutelins, SDSPAGE, polyploidy, UPGAMA