Plant DNA methylation is sensitive to parent seed N content and influences the growth of rice

Xiaoru Fan,Peng Xie,Yufeng Wu,Kaiyun Qian,Jingguang Chen,Guohua Xu,Xiaorong Fan,Man Xu,Zhi Hu,Wenkai Yan,Laihua Liu,Yuyue Zhang

doi:10.1186/s12870-021-02953-3

Xiaoru Fan, Peng Xie + Show 10 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.1186/s12870-021-02953-3

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Abstract

BackgroundNitrogen (N) is an important nutrient for plant growth, development, and agricultural production. Nitrogen stress could induce epigenetic changes in plants. In our research, overexpression of the OsNAR2.1 line was used as a testing target in rice plants with high nitrogen-use efficiency to study the changes of rice methylation and growth in respond of the endogenous and external nitrogen stress.ResultsOur results showed that external N deficiency could decrease seed N content and plant growth of the overexpression line. During the filial growth, we found that the low parent seed nitrogen (LPSN) in the overexpression line could lead to a decrease in the filial seed nitrogen content, total plant nitrogen content, yield, and OsNAR2.1 expression (28, 35, 23, and 55%, respectively) compared with high parent seed nitrogen (HPSN) in high nitrogen external supply. However, such decreases were not observed in wild type. Furthermore, methylation sequencing results showed that LPSN caused massive gene methylation changes, which enriched in over 20 GO pathways in the filial overexpression line, and the expression of OsNAR2.1 in LPSN filial overexpression plants was significantly reduced compared to HPSN filial plants in high external N, which was not shown in wild type.ConclusionsWe suggest that the parent seed nitrogen content decreased induced DNA methylation changes at the epigenetic level and significantly decreased the expression of OsNAR2.1, resulting in a heritable phenotype of N deficiency over two generations of the overexpression line.

Highlights

Nitrogen (N) is an important nutrient for plant growth, development, and agricultural production
Nitrogen deficiency could cause a heritable decrease in the growth of OsNAR2.1 overexpression line We planted overexpression lines of OsNAR2.1 (Ox1) and wild type of Wuyungeng 7(WYG7) in the field with 300 kg N/ha (+N) and 0 kg N/ha (−N) (Fig. 1a, b) in the firstgeneration (S0 generation)
The relative expression of OsNAR2.1 in Ox1 decreased by 62% in the -N field, but a significant difference was not observed in WYG7 between the +N and -N field (Fig. 1f)

Summary

Introduction

Nitrogen (N) is an important nutrient for plant growth, development, and agricultural production. Nitrogen stress could induce epigenetic changes in plants. Overexpression of the OsNAR2.1 line was used as a testing target in rice plants with high nitrogen-use efficiency to study the changes of rice methylation and growth in respond of the endogenous and external nitrogen stress. Epigenetics is defined as the study of DNA sequenceindependent changes in gene function that are mitotically and/or meiotically heritable [12]. There have been reports that phosphate starvation could result in extensive remodeling of global DNA methylation in a plant and is often associated with changes in gene expression [21,22,23,24]. Nitrogen-deficiency stress can induce heritable alteration in DNA methylation [19]. Fan et al (2020) reported that overexpression of OsNAR2.1 does change rice DNA methylation status [25]. The research progress regarding epigenetic influence by the nutrient in both external and endogenous seed is very sparse

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