Identification of Potential Metabolites Mediating Bird’s Selective Feeding on Prunus mira Flowers

Abstract

In peach orchards, birds severely damage flowers during blossom season, decreasing the fruit yield potential. However, the wild peach species Prunus mira shows intraspecific variations of bird damage, indicating that some of the wild trees have developed strategies to avert bird foraging. Motivated by this observation, we formulated the present study to identify the potential flower metabolites mediating the bird’s selective feeding behavior in P. mira flowers. The birds’ preferred (FG) and avoided (BFT) flowers were collected from wild P. mira trees at three different locations, and their metabolite contents were detected, quantified, and compared. The widely-targeted metabolomics approach was employed to detect a diverse set of 603 compounds, predominantly, organic acids, amino acid derivatives, nucleotide and its derivatives, and flavones. By quantitatively comparing the metabolite contents between FG and BFT, three candidate metabolites, including Eriodictiol 6-C-hexoside 8-C-hexoside-O-hexoside, Luteolin O-hexosyl-O-hexosyl-O-hexoside, and Salvianolic acid A, were differentially accumulated and showed the same pattern across the three sampling locations. Distinctly, Salvianolic acid A was abundantly accumulated in FG but absent in BFT, implying that it may be the potential metabolite attracting birds in some P. mira flowers. Overall, this study sheds light on the diversity of the floral metabolome in P. mira and suggests that the bird’s selective feeding behavior may be mediated by variations in floral metabolite contents.

Combined De Novo Transcriptome and Metabolome Analysis of Common Bean Response to Fusarium oxysporum f. sp. phaseoli Infection

“…A combination of UPLC-MS/MS detection platform, self-built database, and multivariate statistical analysis was used to study the differences in metabolome between CK-24 and FO-24. It offers a platform to detect a great diversity of metabolites as previously reported in tomato [29], Prunus mira [30], and hulless barley [31][32][33]. In total, 754 metabolites were successfully detected in both sample types (Table S5).…”

“…The sample preparation, extract analysis, metabolite identification, and quantification were performed at Wuhan MetWare Biotechnology Co., Ltd. (www.metware.cn) following their standard procedures [30].…”

Comparative Metabolomic Analysis of Dendrobium officinale under Different Cultivation Substrates

“…The VIP value was then extracted from the results of OPLS-DA. Finally, metabolites that exhibited statistically significant differences between each two groups of the three groups were screened by the conditions of VIP ≥1 and absolute log 2 (FC) ≥1 [35]. Heatmap was conducted to exhibit the trend of the variation of differential metabolites by the pheatmap (Version 1.0.12) package of R software.…”

Molecular Analysis of UV-C Induced Resveratrol Accumulation in Polygonum cuspidatum Leaves

“…The sample preparation, extract analysis, resveratrol identification and quantification were performed at Wuhan MetWare Biotechnology Co., Ltd, Wuhan, China. (www.metware.cn) following their standard procedures and previously described by Zhang et al [61]. The experimental measurements were carried out in triplicate and results were presented as average of three analyses ± standard deviation.…”