Abstract
Flavonoids are key components of licorice plant that directly affect its medicinal quality. Importantly, the MYB family of transcription factors serves to regulate the synthesis of flavonoids in plants. The MYB transcription factors represent one of the largest families of transcription factors in plants and play important roles in the process of plant growth and development. MYB gene expression is induced by a number of plant hormones, including the lipid-based hormone jasmonate (JA). Methyl jasmonate (MeJA) is an endogenous plant growth regulator that can induce the JA signaling pathway, which functions to regulate the synthesis of secondary metabolites, including flavonoids. In this study, MeJA was added to licorice cell suspensions, and RNA-seq analysis was performed to identify the differentially expressed genes. As a result, the MYB transcription factors GlMYB4 and GlMYB88 were demonstrated to respond significantly to MeJA induction. Subsequently, the GlMYB4 and GlMYB88 protein were shown to localize to the cell nucleus, and it was verified that GlMYB4 and GlMYB88 could positively regulate the synthesis of flavonoids in licorice cells. Overall, this research helps illustrate the molecular regulation of licorice flavonoid biosynthesis induced by MeJA.
Highlights
Flavonoids are a class of naturally occurring compounds that have a 2-phenyl-chromone structure
The results showed that the relative expression levels of the cinnamic acid-4-hydroxylase (C4H) and chalcone synthase (CHS) genes, both known flavonoids biosynthesis genes, in the Methyl jasmonate (MeJA) treatment group were higher than those in the control group within 1–12 h, and their relative expression levels were the highest after 9 h (Fig 1)
The relative expression of the C4H gene was generally greater than that of the CHS gene, and these results indicated that MeJA could regulate the expression of both of these genes
Summary
Flavonoids are a class of naturally occurring compounds that have a 2-phenyl-chromone structure. A large number of studies have shown that flavonoids are non-toxic and harmless; in addition, they possess many biological activities and pharmacological effects, including antioxidant, anticancer, anti-inflammatory and so on [1,2,3]. Licorice (Glycyrrhiza uralensis Fisch) is mainly distributed in western China, including the Inner Mongolia, Ningxia, Xinjiang, and Gansu regions. It is one of the most widely used medicinal herbs, and both its roots and rhizomes are used therapeutically [4, 5]. The primary medicinal components of licorice are flavonoids and triterpenoids [6,7,8,9]. Licorice is widely used in both the pharmaceutical
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