Fig. 1

Wanjincheng orange transgenic plants overexpressing mSDE460. A T-DNA structure of plant expression vector for the genetic transformation of citrus. A 35S, CaMV 35S promoter; GUS:NPTII, fusion of β-glucuronidase and neomycin phosphotransferase genes (for the screening of citrus transformants); mSDE460, the coding sequence of CaLasSDE460 mature protein; NOS, the nopaline synthase terminator; LB, left border; RB, right border. B Screening of transgenic plants by GUS histochemical staining. The blue stains indicated transformants. C Identification of transgenic plants by PCR. M, DNA marker, P, p35S:mSDE460 plasmid; WT, wildtype control; OE-#, transgenic plants. D Relative expression levels of mSDE460 in transgenic plants. Relative expression of CaLasSDE460 in transgenic plans was normalized against its expression in the WT using the citrus GAPDH gene (Mafra et al., 2012) as internal reference. Bars represent the average ± standard error of the means(n = 3). The primers used in (C) and (D) were listed in Supplementary Table 1. The asterisks indicate significant differences compared to WT control (p < 0.05, Student’s t-test)