Abstract
Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) is a model crop for studying development regulation and ripening in flesh fruits and vegetables. Supplementary light to maintain the optimal light environment can lead to the stable growth of tomatoes in greenhouses and areas without sufficient daily light integral. Technological advances in genome-wide molecular phenotyping have dramatically enhanced our understanding of metabolic shifts in the plant metabolism across tomato fruit development. However, comprehensive metabolic and transcriptional behaviors along the developmental process under supplementary light provided by light-emitting diodes (LEDs) remain to be fully elucidated. We present integrative omic approaches to identify the impact on the metabolism of a single tomato plant leaf exposed to monochromatic red LEDs of different intensities during the fruit development stage. Our special light delivery system, the “simplified source-sink model,” involves the exposure of a single leaf below the second truss to red LED light of different intensities. We evaluated fruit-size- and fruit-shape variations elicited by different light intensities. Our findings suggest that more than high-light treatment (500 μmol m-2 s-1) with the red LED light is required to accelerate fruit growth for 2 weeks after anthesis. To investigate transcriptomic and metabolomic changes in leaf- and fruit samples we used microarray-, RNA sequencing-, and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry techniques. We found that metabolic shifts in the carbohydrate metabolism and in several key pathways contributed to fruit development, including ripening and cell-wall modification. Our findings suggest that the proposed workflow aids in the identification of key metabolites in the central metabolism that respond to monochromatic red-LED treatment and contribute to increase the fruit size of tomato plants. This study expands our understanding of systems-level responses mediated by low-, appropriate-, and high levels of red light irradiation in the fruit growth of tomato plants.
Highlights
Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum), a member of the Solanaceae family, is the leading vegetable crop
Under normal light, we observed a remarkable increase in the fruit weight between 1- and 2 weeks after anthesis (WAA), suggesting that the period was critical for early fruit development and the time of cell expansion
When we recorded the fruit weight and leaf area of whole plants grown under supplemental red lightemitting diodes (LEDs) light (P1000), we detected no effect on the fruit biomass at 2 WAA (Supplementary Figure S2B)
Summary
Tomato (Solanum lycopersicum), a member of the Solanaceae family, is the leading vegetable crop. Supplementary lighting [e.g., fluorescent- and high-pressure sodium lamps, and lightemitting diodes (LEDs)] is used for tomato production in Northern Europe and Canada (for example, see Heuvelink et al, 2006) It can compensate for low rates of photosynthesis and increases both the growth and yield of tomato plants when compared to natural light (Gosselin et al, 1996; Gunnlaugsson and Adalsteinsson, 2006). Others documented that supplementary lighting had no- or negative effects (Gunnlaugsson and Adalsteinsson, 2006; Trouwborst et al, 2010) These observations suggest that DLI from natural and supplemental lighting per plant, the light source, and/or the cultivar play an important role in determining fruit growth rates and yield. Depending on the crop species and several growth factors (e.g., temperature, CO2, and air humidity), the light intensity [photosynthetic photon flux (PPF in μmol m−2 s−1)] should be optimized to provide sufficient supplementary lighting without eliciting leaf stress and associated leaf disorders (Moe et al, 2006; Darko et al, 2014)
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