A Genetic and Metabolic Analysis Revealed that Cotton Fiber Cell Development Was Retarded by Flavonoid Naringenin    

Abstract

The cotton (Gossypium spp.) fiber is a unique elongated cell that is useful for investigating cell differentiation. Previous studies have demonstrated the importance of factors such as sugar metabolism, the cytoskeleton, and hormones, which are commonly known to be involved in plant cell development, while the secondary metabolites have been less regarded. By mining public data and comparing analyses of fiber from two cotton species (Gossypium hirsutum and Gossypium barbadense), we found that the flavonoid metabolism is active in early fiber cell development. Different flavonoids exhibited distinct effects on fiber development during ovule culture; among them, naringenin (NAR) could significantly retard fiber development. NAR is a substrate of flavanone 3-hydroxylase (F3H), and silencing the F3H gene significantly increased the NAR content of fiber cells. Fiber development was suppressed following F3H silencing, but the overexpression of F3H caused no obvious effects. Significant retardation of fiber growth was observed after the introduction of the F3H-RNA interference segment into the high-flavonoid brown fiber G. hirsutum T586 line by cross. A greater accumulation of NAR as well as much shorter fibers were also observed in the BC1 generation plants. These results suggest that NAR is negatively associated with fiber development and that the metabolism mediated by F3H is important in fiber development, thus highlighting that flavonoid metabolism represents a novel pathway with the potential for cotton fiber improvement.

CHSsilencing suggests a negative cross-talk between wax and flavonoid pathways in tomato fruit cuticle

“…5 More recently, naringenin has also been involved in retarding cotton cell development. 6 Despite the results observed in the epidermal cells suggested that mature silenced regions were similar to the mature green stage, this was not the case for the cuticle. Cuticles of the pink regions were significantly different from those of the red sectors but also from the mature green stage already reported in the literature.…”

Cotton WRKY1 Mediates the Plant Defense-to-Development Transition during Infection of Cotton byVerticillium dahliaeby ActivatingJASMONATE ZIM-DOMAIN1Expression

“…The full-length coding sequence of GbWRKY1 was inserted into the modified binary plant vector pCAMBIA2300 (Cambia) using XbaI and SacI to construct the vector 35S:GbWRKY1 for overexpression (Xu et al, 2012b). The RNAi region containing a partially conserved domain and the specific 39 region of GbWRKY1 was cloned into the RNAi vector pHellsgate 4 through recombination reaction (Tan et al, 2013). The overexpression vector and RNAi vectors were introduced into G. hirsutum 'YZ1' plants by A. tumefaciens (strain EHA105)-mediated transformation as described previously (Jin et al, 2006).…”

“…Total RNA was isolated as described previously (Tan et al, 2013). For northern blotting, 20 mg of total RNA per lane was separated on 1.2% agaroseformaldehyde gels and transferred onto a nylon membrane.…”

Effects of light on in vitro fiber development and flavonoid biosynthesis in green cotton (Gossypium hirsutum)

“…Flavonoids are synthesized via the pathway of phenyl propane metabolism, in which phenylalanine ammonia lyase (PAL) is the first enzyme to catalyze a reaction. Chalcone synthase (CHS), flavanone-3-hydroxylase (F3H), dihydroflavonol reductase (DFR), anthocyanidin synthase (ANS), and anthocyanidin reductase (ANR) are the major intermediate enzymes in flavonoid biosynthesis [16]. Therefore, the expression levels of these genes will influence the flavonoid contents of green cotton fiber directly.…”

“…1). Ubiquitin 7 (GhUBQ7) was amplified as an internal control, for which the primers were synthesized according to Tan et al [16]. Three biological repeats and at least two technical repeats for each assay were performed.…”