Abstract
Vernalization is a key process for premature bolting. Although many studies on vernalization have been reported, the molecular mechanism of vernalization is still largely unknown in radish. In this study, we sequenced the transcriptomes of radish seedlings at three different time points during vernalization. More than 36 million clean reads were generated for each sample and the portions mapped to the reference genome were all above 67.0%. Our results show that the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) between room temperature and the early stage of vernalization (4,845) are the most in all treatments pairs. A series of vernalization related genes, including two FLOWERING LOCUS C (FLC) genes, were screened according to the annotations. A total of 775 genes were also filtered as the vernalization related candidates based on their expression profiles. Cold stress responsive genes were also analyzed to further confirm the sequencing result. Several key genes in vernalization or cold stress response were validated by quantitative RT-PCR (RT-qPCR). This study identified a number of genes that may be involved in vernalization, which are useful for other functional genomics research in radish.
Highlights
Radish (Raphanus sativus L.) is an economically important root vegetable crop grown worldwide, in China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia [1]
In the plants with the vrn1 and vrn2 mutants, though cold stress can reduce the FLOWERING LOCUS C (FLC) expression, the repression is reversed when the temperature rises again [22, 23]. These results indicate that VERNALIZATION INSENSITIVE 3 (VIN3) participates in the suppression of FLC at the beginning of vernalization, while VRN1 and VRN2 function to maintain the low level of FLC expression
The samples were labeled as RT1, RT2, and RT3 for the room temperature treatment (RT), VE1, VE2, and VE3 for the early stage of vernalization (VE), and VL1, VL2, and VL3 for the late stage of vernalization (VL), respectively
Summary
Radish (Raphanus sativus L.) is an economically important root vegetable crop grown worldwide, in China, Japan, Korea, and Southeast Asia [1]. For the nutrient-rich tuberous root, many breeding efforts on radish have been devoted to developing varieties with different size [2,3,4], color [5,6,7,8,9], cultivation season [5, 10, 11] and other characteristics [12,13,14]. All-season radish is available in many areas there are still a lot of practical problems in production, among which premature bolting is one of the most prominent. A better understanding of the molecular mechanism of vernalization will be helpful to solve these practical problems such as premature bolting. In the past several decades, many efforts were made to illustrate the molecular mechanisms of vernalization in various plants, among which Arabidopsis thaliana has been studied
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