Comparative Transcriptome Analysis of Gene Expression Patterns in Tomato Under Dynamic Light Conditions

Juanjuan Ding,Jing Zhang,Linjie Xi,Tonghua Pan,Jiantao Zhao,Zhirong Zou

doi:10.3390/genes10090662

Abstract

Plants grown under highly variable natural light regimes differ strongly from plants grown under constant light (CL) regimes. Plant phenotype and adaptation responses are important for plant biomass and fitness. However, the underlying regulatory mechanisms are still poorly understood, particularly from a transcriptional perspective. To investigate the influence of different light regimes on tomato plants, three dynamic light (DL) regimes were designed, using a CL regime as control. Morphological, photosynthetic, and transcriptional differences after five weeks of treatment were compared. Leaf area, plant height, shoot /root weight, total chlorophyll content, photosynthetic rate, and stomatal conductance all significantly decreased in response to DL regimes. The biggest expression difference was found between the treatment with the highest light intensity at the middle of the day with a total of 1080 significantly up-/down-regulated genes. A total of 177 common differentially expressed genes were identified between DL and CL conditions. Finally, significant differences were observed in the levels of gene expression between DL and CL treatments in multiple pathways, predominantly of plant–pathogen interactions, plant hormone signal transductions, metabolites, and photosynthesis. These results expand the understanding of plant development and photosynthetic regulations under DL conditions by multiple pathways.

Highlights

Global agriculture faces an increasing demand due to growing population, climate change, and constraints of land, water, and rural farm labors [1]
The treatments were conducted after seedlings unearth using fluorescent light (CFLS; TL 5 Essential 21W/ 865, Philips, Shanghai, China), and the lighting array was fixed at 10 cm above the plant canopy
These results indicate that the light intensity distributions during the day exerted a significant impact on the morphological development of tomato plants

Summary

Introduction

Global agriculture faces an increasing demand due to growing population, climate change, and constraints of land, water, and rural farm labors [1]. The light source is the main factor that directly impacts crop yield and crop performance by influencing photosynthesis and light-signaling metabolism processes. Agricultural production and the achieved crop quality can be influenced by many light-related factors, such as light intensity [2,3], light quality [4,5,6], light period [7,8], and light source [9,10]. Artificial light sources are widely used in modern crop cultivation systems, especially in a controlled environment, to increase the yield of agriculture products. Adjusting artificial light resource plays an important role in improving high-efficient productions of major crops. Lettuce fresh weight was shown to increase with light intensity level, except for the 800 μmol

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion