Description of cucumber candidate reference genes based on the comparison with their Arabidopsis orthologs.

Seven of the twelve candidate cucumber reference genes (CACS, TIP41, PDF2, GW881873, YSL8, HEL) have been recently retrieved from the whole cucumber genome sequence [36] using the novel reference genes identified in Arabidopsis as the query sequences [3]. The commonly used remaining five genes (ACT, TUA, UBI-1, EFα, CYP) were previously available in the Genbank database as partial cDNAs. The full cDNAs and exon/intron organization of all 12 candidate genes were established using BlastN, and FGENESH or FGENESH+.