Abstract
Watermelon (Citrullus lanatus) is one of the most nutritional fruits that is widely distributed in the whole world. The nutritional compositions are mainly influenced by the genotype and environment. However, the metabolomics of different domestication status and different flesh colors watermelon types is not fully understood. In this study, we reported an extensive assessment of metabolomic divergence in the fruit flesh among Citrullus sp. and within Citrullus sp. We demonstrate that metabolic profiling was significantly different between the wild and cultivated watermelons, the apigenin 6-C-glucoside, luteolin 6-C-glucoside, chrysoeriol C-hexoside, naringenin C-hexoside, C-pentosyl-chrysoeriol O-hexoside, and sucrose are the main divergent metabolites. Correlation analysis results revealed that flavonoids were present in one tight metabolite cluster. The main divergent metabolites in different flesh-colored cultivated watermelon fruits are p-coumaric acid, 2,3-dihydroflavone, catechin, N-(3-indolylacetyl)-l-alanine, 3,4-dihydroxycinnamic acid, and pelargonidin o-hexoside. A total of 431 differentially accumulated metabolites were identified from pairwise comparative analyses. C. lanatus edible-seed watermelon (cultivars) and C. mucosospermus (wild) have similar fruit metabolic profiles and phenotypic traits, indicating that edible-seed watermelon may be a relative of wild species and a relatively primitive differentiation type of cultivated watermelon. Our data provide extensive knowledge for metabolomics-based watermelon improvement of Citrullus fruits meet their enhanced nutritive properties or upgraded germplasm utility values.
Highlights
Plants synthesize an extremely large number of metabolites that have diverse structures and different functions [1,2,3,4]
We found that different groups of metabolites were selected for different types of watermelons during the speciation and domestication process or cultivar differentiation process
The primitive watermelons possess white flesh, so we focus on the cultivated types for analyzing the comparative metabolomics of different fleshcolored watermelon
Summary
Plants synthesize an extremely large number of metabolites that have diverse structures and different functions [1,2,3,4]. Mining natural variations among various plant metabolites and exploring the metabolic networks is of great interest to scientists worldwide. The comprehensive metabolic profiling and metabolic genome-wide association study have been performed in rice, maize, tomato, wheat, and other crops, many novel genes and potential metabolic pathways have been identified and elucidated [12,13,14,15,16,17,18]. Plant metabolome is considered as a connection between the plant genome and phenotypic traits [19]. The metabolite features are closely associated with important phenotypic traits or food quality [20,21,22,23].
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