Expression of betacyanin biosynthetic genes in response to <i>continuous</i> insect herbivory.

Relative expression levels3 were determined in leaves of A. hypochondriacus plants, with contrasting pigmentation patterns, subjected to insect herbivory. Induced or repressed levels of expression (i.e. relative expression ≥1.5 or ≤0.5) are shown in bold text and italics, respectively. 1h = time, in hours, when the tissues were sampled after an 18 h period of continuous insect feeding. 2The genotypes examined in this study were Ah cv. Nutrisol (AhNut; with predominantly betacyanic leaves), Ah India Red (AhIR; with predominantly betacyanic stems) and Ah India Green (AhIG; with all tissues acyanic). 3The fold change in the expression of the target genes was calculated using the 2−ΔΔCt method according to [76].