Transcriptome analysis of thermogenic Arum concinnatum reveals the molecular components of floral scent production

Abstract

Several plant species can generate enough heat to increase their internal floral temperature above ambient temperature. Among thermogenic plants, Arum concinnatum shows the highest respiration activity during thermogenesis. However, an overall understanding of the genes related to plant thermogenesis has not yet been achieved. In this study, we performed de novo transcriptome analysis of flower organs in A. concinnatum. The de novo transcriptome assembly represented, in total, 158,490 non-redundant transcripts, and 53,315 of those showed significant homology with known genes. To explore genes associated with thermogenesis, we filtered 1266 transcripts that showed a significant correlation between expression pattern and the temperature trend of each sample. We confirmed five putative alternative oxidase transcripts were included in filtered transcripts as expected. An enrichment analysis of the Gene Ontology terms for the filtered transcripts suggested over-representation of genes involved in 1-deoxy-d-xylulose-5-phosphate synthase (DXS) activity. The expression profiles of DXS transcripts in the methyl-d-erythritol 4-phosphate (MEP) pathway were significantly correlated with thermogenic levels. Our results suggest that the MEP pathway is the main biosynthesis route for producing scent monoterpenes. To our knowledge, this is the first report describing the candidate pathway and the key enzyme for floral scent production in thermogenic plants.

Genetic Divergence and Relationship Among Opisthopappus Species Identified by Development of EST-SSR Markers

“…A number of reports have been published regarding the interspecific relationships between Opisthopappus species based on molecular markers (Wang, 2013;Wang and Yan, 2013); however, such research has been limited due to the lack of specific genomic information on Opisthopappus. Compared with other EST-SSR markers of plants (Kudapa et al, 2012;Onda et al, 2015;Wei et al, 2016;Li et al, 2018), the developed Opisthopappus transcriptomic SSR markers showed a high level of genetic diversity (Table 2), which indicated that the identified microsatellite loci possessed high allele numbers and heterozygosity, which provided efficient genetic markers for Opisthopappus populations.…”

Transcriptome analysis of colored calla lily (Zantedeschia rehmanniiEngl.) by Illumina sequencing:de novoassembly, annotation and EST-SSR marker development

“…This strategy can enrich the large amounts of expressed sequence data for non-model organisms for which the reference genome or transcriptome is not available (Martin & Wang, 2011). Several non-model organisms in the Araceae family, including Z. aethiopica (Cândido et al, 2014) Arum concinnatum (Onda et al, 2015), Anthurium andraeanum (Tian et al, 2013; Yang et al, 2015; Li et al, 2015), Pinellia ternate (Wang et al, 2014), Amorphophallus konjac and A. bulbifer (Zheng et al, 2013; Diao et al, 2014), have been recently studied by transcriptome sequencing, which has provided a better understanding of these crops. EST-SSR markers have been successfully characterized and developed in P. ternate (Wang et al, 2014), A. konjac and A. bulbifer (Zheng et al, 2013).…”

Perspectives on functions of AOX and UCP in floral thermogenesis

“…本研究组在对玉兰生热 期间蛋白表达的研究中发现, UCP与AOX均有一定水 平的表达(未发表数据). Onda等人 [68] 发现, 生热植物 [69,70] . 并且, 这些差 异表达基因的蛋白产物大多定位于线粒体和叶绿体, 与线粒体功能紧密相关 [62] .…”