Abstract
BackgroundLeaf color is an important ornamental trait of colored-leaf plants. The change of leaf color is closely related to the synthesis and accumulation of anthocyanins in leaves. Acer pseudosieboldianum is a colored-leaf tree native to Northeastern China, however, there was less knowledge in Acer about anthocyanins biosynthesis and many steps of the pathway remain unknown to date.ResultsAnthocyanins metabolite and transcript profiling were conducted using HPLC and ESI-MS/MS system and high-throughput RNA sequencing respectively. The results demonstrated that five anthocyanins were detected in this experiment. It is worth mentioning that Peonidin O-hexoside and Cyanidin 3, 5-O-diglucoside were abundant, especially Cyanidin 3, 5-O-diglucoside displayed significant differences in content change at two periods, meaning it may be play an important role for the final color. Transcriptome identification showed that a total of 67.47 Gb of clean data were obtained from our sequencing results. Functional annotation of unigenes, including comparison with COG and GO databases, yielded 35,316 unigene annotations. 16,521 differentially expressed genes were identified from a statistical analysis of differentially gene expression. The genes related to leaf color formation including PAL, ANS, DFR, F3H were selected. Also, we screened out the regulatory genes such as MYB, bHLH and WD40. Combined with the detection of metabolites, the gene pathways related to anthocyanin synthesis were analyzed.ConclusionsCyanidin 3, 5-O-diglucoside played an important role for the final color. The genes related to leaf color formation including PAL, ANS, DFR, F3H and regulatory genes such as MYB, bHLH and WD40 were selected. This study enriched the available transcriptome information for A. pseudosieboldianum and identified a series of differentially expressed genes related to leaf color, which provides valuable information for further study on the genetic mechanism of leaf color expression in A. pseudosieboldianum.
Highlights
Leaf color is an important ornamental trait of colored-leaf plants
Contents of anthocyanin in the leaves In order to explore the mechanism of pigment formation in A. pseudosieboldianum leaves, we carried out qualitative analysis of anthocyanin components in the middle (M) and last stage (A) of leaf color transformation (The anthocyanin content was extremely low in early stage (B), only M and A stage were analyzed)
We found that ApMYB4 gene was down-regulated in the stage of green to red transformation, which is consistent with the previous research results, indicating that ApMYB4 gene may be a transcription factor promoting anthocyanin synthesis in A. pseudosieboldianum
Summary
Leaf color is an important ornamental trait of colored-leaf plants. The change of leaf color is closely related to the synthesis and accumulation of anthocyanins in leaves. Acer pseudosieboldianum is a colored-leaf tree native to Northeastern China, there was less knowledge in Acer about anthocyanins biosynthesis and many steps of the pathway remain unknown to date. Result showed that the change of leaf color is closely related to the synthesis and accumulation of anthocyanins in leaves [5]. Anthocyanins confer orange, red, magenta, violet and blue and the biosynthetic pathway leading to floral or pulp pigment accumulation had been well characterized and the genes encoding relevant enzymes and transcriptional factors have been isolated [7, 8]. The mechanism of leaf color change in colored-leaf plants needs to be further studied
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