Transcriptomic analysis of differentially expressed genes in an orange-pericarp mutant and wild type in pummelo (Citrus grandis)

BMC Plant Biology

Research Article

Fei Guo¹  Xiuxin Deng¹  Huiwen Yu¹  Qiang Xu¹ 

[1] Key Laboratory of Horticultural Plant Biology (Ministry of Education), Huazhong Agricultural University, 430070, Wuhan, China;

关键词: Citrus;    RNA-seq;    Transcriptome profile;    Carotenoid;    qRT-PCR;   

DOI  :  10.1186/s12870-015-0435-3

 received in 2014-09-15, accepted in 2015-01-22,  发布年份 2015

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThe external colour of fruit is a crucial quality feature, and the external coloration of most citrus fruits is due to the accumulation of carotenoids. The molecular regulation of carotenoid biosynthesis and accumulation in pericarp is limited due to the lack of mutant. In this work, an orange-pericarp mutant (MT) which showed altered pigmentation in the pericarp was used to identify genes potentially related to the regulation of carotenoid accumulation in the pericarp.ResultsHigh Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) analysis revealed that the pericarp from MT fruits had a 10.5-fold increase of β-carotene content over that of the Wild Type (WT). Quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) analysis showed that the expression of all downstream carotenogenic genes was lower in MT than in WT, suggesting that down-regulation is critical for the β-carotene increase in the MT pericarp. RNA-seq analysis of the transcriptome revealed extensive changes in the MT gene expression level, with 168 genes down-regulated and 135 genes up-regulated. Gene ontology (GO) and KEGG pathway analyses indicated seven reliable metabolic pathways are altered in the mutant, including carbon metabolism, starch and sucrose metabolism and biosynthesis of amino acids. The transcription factors and genes corresponding to effected metabolic pathways may involved in the carotenoid regulation was confirmed by the qRT-PCR analysis in the MT pericarp.ConclusionsThis study has provided a global picture of the gene expression changes in a novel mutant with distinct color in the fruit pericarp of pummelo. Interpretation of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) revealed new insight into the molecular regulation of β-carotene accumulation in the MT pericarp.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Guo et al.; licensee BioMed Central. 2015. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly credited. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.