Effects of various artificial agarwood-induction techniques on the metabolome of Aquilaria sinensis

Ningnan Zhang,Daping Xu,Xiaojin Liu,Zhou Hong,Jie Song,Shiyu Xue,Dahao Zhou,Xiuren Zhou

doi:10.1186/s12870-021-03378-8

Abstract

BackgroundAgarwood is a highly sought-after resinous wood for uses in medicine, incense, and perfume production. To overcome challenges associated with agarwood production in Aquilaria sinensis, several artificial agarwood-induction treatments have been developed. However, the effects of these techniques on the metabolome of the treated wood samples are unknown. Therefore, the present study was conducted to evaluate the effects of four treatments: fire drill treatment (F), fire drill + brine treatment (FS), cold drill treatment (D) and cold drill + brine treatment (DS)) on ethanol-extracted oil content and metabolome profiles of treated wood samples from A. sinensis.ResultsThe ethanol-extracted oil content obtained from the four treatments differed significantly (F < D < DS < FS). A total of 712 metabolites composed mostly of alkaloids, amino acids and derivatives, flavonoids, lipids, phenolic acids, organic acids, nucleotides and derivatives, and terpenoids were detected. In pairwise comparisons, 302, 155, 271 and 363 differentially accumulated metabolites (DAM) were detected in F_vs_FS, D_vs_DS, F_vs_D and FS_vs_DS, respectively. The DAMs were enriched in flavonoid/flavone and flavonol biosynthesis, sesquiterpenoid and triterpenoid biosynthesis. Generally, addition of brine to either fire or cold drill treatments reduced the abundance of most of the metabolites.ConclusionThe results from this study offer valuable insights into synthetically-induced agarwood production in A. sinensis.

Highlights

Agarwood is a highly sought-after resinous wood for uses in medicine, incense, and perfume production
Influence of different treatments on ethanol‐extracted oil content derived from Agarwood We used the ultrasonic-assisted solvent extraction method with minor modifications [23] to extract and quantify ethanol-extracted oil content from the A. sinensis wounded by fire drill treatment (F), fire drill + brine treatment (FS), cold drill treatment (D) and cold drill + brine treatment (DS) (Fig. 1)
Since we observed an effect of the different treatments on the oil production in agarwood from A. sinensis, we further conducted a widely-targeted metabolome profiling on agarwood samples (4 treatments × 3 biological repeats) from A. sinensis using the Ultra-Performance Liquid Chromatography Tandem Mass Spectrometry (UPLC-MS/MS)

Summary

Introduction

Agarwood is a highly sought-after resinous wood for uses in medicine, incense, and perfume production. Other non-traditional induction strategies include trunk injection with solvents that contain ions or microbial additives to facilitate the production of agarwood [4, 11, 14] and trunk injection with solvents that contain ions but do not contain any microbial additives [4, 11, 14]. These induction methods are used in commercial agarwood production in China and other agarwood-producing countries. Some recent investigations imply that the quality of non-traditionally-produced agarwood is comparable to that of traditionally-produced agarwood, others have reported that there are chemical variations between the two types of agarwood [2, 4, 8, 11, 15]

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Discussion

Conclusion