Methylation-sensitive Amplified Polymorphism and Its Application to Plant Genetics

DNA methylation is an important component in epigenetics,and plays crucial roles in the regulation of gene expression,growth,development,and resistance to stress in plant.With progress in study on DNA methylation,methylation-senstive amplified polymorphism(MSAP) is a PCR-based technique with superiority of generating abundant polymorphism profile and easy operation for detecting status of DNA methylation.Currently,it has been widely applied to the various fields of genetics research,such as identification of germplasm resource,plant improvement,analyses of population genetic structure,and evolution research.In this paper,the principles,procedures,and applications of MSAP in plant genetic studies were summarized.At the same time,the perspective of its application in the future was discussed.