Abstract
Cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS) is important for exploiting heterosis in crop plants and also serves as a model for investigating nuclear–cytoplasmic interaction. The molecular mechanism of cytoplasmic male sterility and fertility restoration was investigated in several important economic crops but remains poorly understood in the Welsh onion. Therefore, we compared the differences between the CMS line 64-2 and its maintainer line 64-1 using transcriptome sequencing with the aim of determining critical genes and pathways associated with male sterility. This study combined two years of RNA-seq data; there were 1504 unigenes (in May 2013) and 2928 unigenes (in May 2014) that were differentially expressed between the CMS and cytoplasmic male maintainer Welsh onion varieties. Known CMS-related genes were found in the set of differentially expressed genes and checked by qPCR. These genes included F-type ATPase, NADH dehydrogenase, cytochrome c oxidase, etc. Overall, this study demonstrated that the CMS regulatory genes and pathways may be associated with the mitochondria and nucleus in the Welsh onion. We believe that this transcriptome dataset will accelerate the research on CMS gene clones and other functional genomics research on A. fistulosum L.
Highlights
As an important vegetable crop, The Welsh onion (Allium fistulosum L.) is cultivated worldwide from tropical Asia to Northeast Asia
The GO terms that identified the DEGs were related to cytoplasmic male sterility (CMS), i.e., “mitochondrion”, “mitochondrial respiratory chain”, “phosphorylation”, and “oxidation-reduction process”, and the cluster frequency of these DEGs was >5%
This study investigated the important CMS-related genes and pathways in the Welsh onion by transcriptome analysis
Summary
As an important vegetable crop, The Welsh onion (Allium fistulosum L.) is cultivated worldwide from tropical Asia to Northeast Asia. Because it is rich in propylene sulfide having bactericidal and anti-inflammatory effects, the Welsh onion has been used as an herbal medicine for diverse diseases, such as febrile disease, headache, diarrhea, abdominal pain, eye-related disorders, and habitual abortion [1]. The Welsh onion is a cross-pollinated crop, and heterosis has been extensively applied in breeding [2]. Thereafter, Chinese researchers discovered the CMS line in the Welsh onion (Allium fistulosum L.) [12]. It has been proven to be an efficient way to obtain a heterosis hybrid, harboring important commercial benefit in the Welsh onion seed market [13,14,15]
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