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Abstract
The delayed seed germination and poor seedling growth caused by imbibitional chilling injury was common phenomenon in maize seedling establishment. In this study, RNA sequencing technology was used to comprehensively investigate the gene expressions in chilling-imbibed maize embryo and to reveal the underlying mechanism of chilling injury at molecular level. Imbibed seeds for 2 h at 5°C (LT2) were selected and transcriptomic comparative analysis was performed. Among 327 DEGs indentified between dry seed (CK0) and LT2, 15 specific genes with plasma membrane (PM) relevant functions belonging to lipid metabolism, stress, signaling and transport were characterized, and most of them showed down-regulation pattern under chilling stress. When transferred to 25°C for recovery (LT3), remarkable changes occurred in maize embryo. There were 873 DEGs including many PM related genes being identified between LT2 and LT3, some of which showing significant increase after 1 h recovery. Moreover, 15 genes encoding intracellular vesicular trafficking proteins were found to be exclusively differential expressed at recovery stage. It suggested that the intracellular vesicle trafficking might be essential for PM recovery through PM turnover. Furthermore, transcriptome analyses on imbibed embryos under normal condition (25°C) were also made as a contrast. A total of 651 DEGs were identified to mainly involved in protein metabolism, transcriptional regulation, signaling, and energy productions. Overall, the RNA-Seq results provided us a deep knowledge of imbibitional chilling injury on plasma membrane and a new view on PM repaired mechanism during early seed imbibition at transcriptional level. The DEGs identified in this work would be useful references in future seed germination research.
Highlights
A rapid and proper seedling establishment after sowing plays a crucial role in maize (Zea Mays L.) productions
It has been well known that macromolecules and organelles often undergo a recovery process due to water absorption during early imbibition of dry seeds, such as the damages on proteins could be reversed by protein L-isoAsp-O-methyltransferase (PIMT) (Ogé et al, 2008) and DNA damages often were repaired by DNA ligases (Waterworth et al, 2010)
The results indicated that chilling imbibition negatively affected plasma membrane (PM) function, leading to the decrease of membrane stability, signal transduction, and transport metabolic activity
Summary
A rapid and proper seedling establishment after sowing plays a crucial role in maize (Zea Mays L.) productions. As one kind of thermophilic crops, maize is susceptible to chilling injury when sowed in early spring, inhibiting severely seed germination and seedling growth (Prasad, 1996). During seed early imbibition, the structural and functional recovery including resumption of energy metabolism, DNA/protein repair, activation of transcription and translation taken place severely (Weitbrecht et al, 2011). Early imbibition is often accompanied by a massive leakage of cellular solutes, which is a sign of damage to membrane system derived from the desiccation (Leprince et al, 1993; Weitbrecht et al, 2011). The repair mechanism on damaged membrane was still unclear (Han and Yang, 2015)
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