Novel findings to the biosynthetic pathway of magnoflorine and taspine through transcriptomic and metabolomic analysis of Croton draco (Euphorbiaceae)

Abstract

BackgroundCroton draco is an arboreal species and its latex as well as some other parts of the plant, are traditionally used in the treatment of a wide range of ailments and diseases. Alkaloids, such as magnoflorine, prevent early atherosclerosis progression while taspine, an abundant constituent of latex, has been described as a wound-healer and antitumor-agent. Despite the great interest for these and other secondary metabolites, no omics resources existed for the species and the biosynthetic pathways of these alkaloids remain largely unknown.ResultsTo gain insights into the pathways involved in magnoflorine and taspine biosynthesis by C. draco and identify the key enzymes in these processes, we performed an integrated analysis of the transcriptome and metabolome in the major organs (roots, stem, leaves, inflorescences, and flowers) of this species. Transcript profiles were generated through high-throughput RNA-sequencing analysis while targeted and high resolution untargeted metabolomic profiling was also performed. The biosynthesis of these compounds appears to occur in the plant organs examined, but intermediaries may be translocated from the cells in which they are produced to other cells in which they accumulate.ConclusionsOur results provide a framework to better understand magnoflorine and taspine biosynthesis in C. draco. In addition, we demonstrate the potential of multi-omics approaches to identify candidate genes involved in the biosynthetic pathways of interest.

Automatic Identification of Players in the Flavonoid Biosynthesis with Application on the Biomedicinal Plant Croton tiglium

“…All available RNA-Seq data sets of C. tiglium [ 86 , 117 ] and C. draco [ 118 ] were retrieved from the Sequence Read Archive ( ) via fastq-dump v2.9.6 ( ). Kallisto v0.44 [ 119 ] was applied with default parameters to quantify the abundance of transcripts based on the C. tiglium transcriptome assembly [ 86 ].…”

Bioactive Isoquinoline Alkaloids with Diverse Skeletons from Fissistigma polyanthum

“…To date, only six members of this type of aporphinoid alkaloids have been found to occur in nature. ,− More interestingly, these kinds of alkaloids are all characterized by the presence of oxalyl derivatives linked to a unique dehydroaporphine scaffold via C(12)–N (6) and C(13)–C (7) bonds. Biogenetically, the oxalyl-aporphine hybrids might be generated from mixed biosynthetic pathways such as amino acid and oxalate pathways via electrophilic substitution reaction. − …”

Identification of gene markers to predict proanthocyanidins biosynthesis in cell culture of Croton lechleri

“…catechin, afzelechin, and gallocatechin) by LAR (leucoanthocyanidin reductase). Nevertheless, the LAR gene was not identified in A. thaliana, which has been reported to have only epicatechin (Abrahams et al 2003), so the homologous sequences were not available for Croton draco annotation (Canedo-Téxon et al 2019), nor for the present work. However, the PA production could be determined by the expressional competition and/or the presence/absence of ANS and ANR, confirming that these two genes could represent valuable markers to predict the PAs biosynthesis among the many genes herein evaluated (Fig.…”

“…Since both C. lechleri and C. draco are sources of dragon's blood sap (DBS) (Gupta et al 2008) and are closely related in the Croton sect. Cyclostigma taxonomy (Riina et al 2009), we used the unigenes annotated by Canedo-Téxon et al (2019) to find genes related to PAs pathways in C. lechleri and to design specific primers for quantitative Real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) by using Primer3 v.0.4.0 (http:// bioin fo. ut.…”