Insights from the Cold Transcriptome and Metabolome of Dendrobium officinale: Global Reprogramming of Metabolic and Gene Regulation Networks during Cold Acclimation

Abstract

Plant cold acclimation (CA) is a genetically complex phenomenon involving gene regulation and expression. Little is known about the cascading pattern of gene regulatroy network and the link between genes and metabolites during CA. Dendrobium officinale (DOKM) is an important medicinal and ornamental plant and hypersensitive to low temperature. Here, we used the large scale metabolomic and transcriptomic technologies to reveal the response to CA in DOKM seedlings based on the physiological profile analyses. Lowering temperature from 4 to –2°C resulted in significant increase (P < 0.01) in antioxidant activities and electrolyte leakage (EL) during 24 h. The fitness CA piont of 0°C and control (20°C) during 20 h were firstly obtained according to physiological analyses. Subsequently, massive transcriptome and metabolome reprogramming occurred during CA. The gene to metabolite network demonstrated that the CA associated processes are highly energy demanding through activating hydrolysis of sugars, amino acids catabolism and citrate cycle. The expression levels of 2,767 genes were significantly affected by CA, including 153-fold upregulation of CBF transcription factor, 56-fold upregulation of MAPKKK16 protein kinase. Moreover, the gene interaction and regulation network analysis revealed that the CA as an active process, was regulated at the transcriptional, post-transcriptional, translational and post-translational levels. Our findings highligted a comprehensive regulatory mechanism including cold signal transduction, transcriptional regulation, and gene expression, which contributes a deeper understanding of the highly complex regulatory program during CA in DOKM. Some marker genes identified in DOKM seedlings will allow us to understand the role of each individual during CA by further functional analyses.

Low‐temperature tolerance of the Antarctic species Deschampsia antarctica: A complex metabolic response associated with nutrient remobilization

“…The reductions in metabolite levels observed at low temperature for both DA populations were considerably different to the changes displayed by TA (Figure ), as well as those reported for other species (Angelcheva et al, ; Cook, Fowler, Fiehn, & Thomashow, ; Wu, Jiang, Chen, Mantri, & Tao, ; Zhang et al, ). For this reason, we compiled a dataset based on eight studies comparing the metabolome performance in plants growing at optimum and low temperatures.…”

Integrated transcriptomics and metabolomics analysis to characterize cold stress responses in Nicotiana tabacum

“…“MAPK signaling pathway” and “cAMP signaling pathway” were also enriched. Previously, it was reported that different protein kinase families (such as MAPKs) are activated by osmotic stresses [1, 2, 33]. These protein kinases may be important components in the signal transduction pathway of various environment signals in plants under cold stress.

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Effects of low‐temperature conditioning and cold storage on development of chilling injuries and the transcriptome of ‘Wonderful’ pomegranate fruit

“…6). These signalling cascades are important factors in modulating the acquisition of cold tolerance; for example, it was reported that MAPK3, MAPK4 and MAPKKK were induced following exposure to cold stress in Arabidopsos thaliana (Mizoguchi et al, 1996;Nakagami et al, 2005), and that exposure to cold acclimation markedly increased transcript levels of the MAPKKK16 gene in Dendrobium flowers (Wu et al, 2016).…”

“…Previous studies reported that exposure to conditioning/acclimation treatments activated various molecular mechanisms including TFs, hormone metabolism, signalling, stress genes, cellular redox status, ethylene production and lipid metabolism. For example, cold acclimation induced the following: AP2, NAC, WRKY and MYB TF genes in Bermuda grass and eucalyptus (Zhu et al, 2015;Gaete-Loyola et al, 2017); ABA signalling genes in olive, zucchini and eucalyptus (Guerra et al, 2015;Gaete-Loyola et al, 2017); reactive oxygen species (ROS) scavenging in olive and tomato (Guerra et al, 2015;Barrero-Gil et al, 2016); jasmonic acid biosynthesis pathways in Camelia (Li et al, 2016) and MAPK signalling in Dendrobium (Wu et al, 2016). In peach, LTC elevated ERFs and ethylene-synthesising enzymes' mRNA levels, as well as ethylene production thus enhancing fruit softening while considerably lowering internal browning symptoms (Tanou et al, 2017;Wang et al, 2017a).…”