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Abstract
Autophagy plays crucial roles in the recycling of metabolites, and is involved in many developmental processes. Rice mutants defective in autophagy are male sterile due to immature pollens, indicating its critical role in pollen development. However, physiological roles of autophagy during seed maturation had remained unknown. We here found that seeds of the rice autophagy-deficient mutant Osatg7-1, that produces seeds at a very low frequency in paddy fields, are smaller and show chalky appearance and lower starch content in the endosperm at the mature stage under normal growth condition. We comprehensively analyzed the effects of disruption of autophagy on biochemical properties, proteome and seed quality, and found an abnormal activation of starch degradation pathways including accumulation of α-amylases in the endosperm during seed maturation in Osatg7-1. These results indicate critical involvement of autophagy in metabolic regulation in the endosperm of rice, and provide insights into novel autophagy-mediated regulation of starch metabolism during seed maturation.
Highlights
Autophagy plays crucial roles in the recycling of metabolites, and is involved in many developmental processes
The fertility rate of the Osatg[] mutant (1.3 ± 1.3 {n = 30}, 2016A; 4.3 ± 4.1{n = 61}, 2017B; 1.8 ± 1.7{n = 40}, 2018B) was much lower than those of the wild type (WT; 91.6 ± 8.6{n = 12}, 2016A; 94.8 ± 2.9 {n = 24}, 2017B; 84.7 ± 4.7 {n = 20}, 2018B). We investigated these seeds in order to understand if autophagy plays any roles in seed developmental processes in rice, and found that the majority of the Osatg[] had grains with whitish chalky appearance under normal growth condition in the paddy field (Fig. 1b)
These phenotypes of the autophagy-deficient mutant were quite similar to those observed in the WT seeds suffering from heat stress during seed maturation[24]
Summary
Autophagy plays crucial roles in the recycling of metabolites, and is involved in many developmental processes. We comprehensively analyzed the effects of disruption of autophagy on biochemical properties, proteome and seed quality, and found an abnormal activation of starch degradation pathways including accumulation of α-amylases in the endosperm during seed maturation in Osatg[]. These results indicate critical involvement of autophagy in metabolic regulation in the endosperm of rice, and provide insights into novel autophagy-mediated regulation of starch metabolism during seed maturation. Multidisciplinary analyses including microscopic, biochemical, genetic and proteomic analyses revealed that this is due to misregulation of sugar and starch metabolism mediated at least in part by abnormal upregulation of α-amylase during seed maturation These results indicate critical roles of autophagy in seed maturation, grain quality control during reproductive development in rice, and suggest the impact of controlling autophagy in agriculture
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