Involvement of Cytosine DNA methylation in different developmental stages of Aeluropus littoralis

Dna methylation as epigenetic mark plays a key role in normal differential and developmental processesas well as in dynamic gene regulation at the genomic level. to assess dna methylation pattern indifferent developmental stages of aeluropus littoralis, methylation sensitive amplified polymorphism(msap) was used. methylation and demethylation status at the ccgg recognition site were tracked bytwo sets of cytosine methylation-sensitive enzymes (mspi and hpaii), which were classified into threetypes. the percentage of total bands per type i (non methylation), type ii (cpg methylation) and type iii(cpcpg methylation) fragments were 75.7, 19.4 and 4.9, respectively. the most frequent methylationevents (19.4%) were observed in type ii fragment in which full methylation pattern occurred. out of 480bands, 33 bands showed methylation alterations between differential developmental stages in all threetypes of detectable methylation levels. in this study, polymorphic bands had two main directionsassociated with methylation or demethylation patterns in which methylation level increased during plantdevelopment. the methylation and demethylation events at cg sites could be related to developmentalstage-specific gene regulation