Planting Season Impacts Sugarcane Stem Development, Secondary Metabolite Levels, and Natural Antisense Transcription

Abstract

To reduce the potentially irreversible environmental impacts caused by fossil fuels, the use of renewable energy sources must be increased on a global scale. One promising source of biomass and bioenergy is sugarcane. The study of this crop’s development in different planting seasons can aid in successfully cultivating it in global climate change scenarios. The sugarcane variety SP80-3280 was field grown under two planting seasons with different climatic conditions. A systems biology approach was taken to study the changes on physiological, morphological, agrotechnological, transcriptomics, and metabolomics levels in the leaf +1, and immature, intermediate and mature internodes. Most of the variation found within the transcriptomics and metabolomics profiles is attributed to the differences among the distinct tissues. However, the integration of both transcriptomics and metabolomics data highlighted three main metabolic categories as the principal sources of variation across tissues: amino acid metabolism, biosynthesis of secondary metabolites, and xenobiotics biodegradation and metabolism. Differences in ripening and metabolite levels mainly in leaves and mature internodes may reflect the impact of contrasting environmental conditions on sugarcane development. In general, the same metabolites are found in mature internodes from both “one-year” and “one-and-a-half-year sugarcane”, however, some metabolites (i.e., phenylpropanoids with economic value) and natural antisense transcript expression are only detected in the leaves of “one-year” sugarcane.

Antisense Transcription in Plants: A Systematic Review and an Update on cis-NATs of Sugarcane

“…Evidence of antisense regulation in cellular programming and differentiation [ 52 , 127 ], circadian rhythm [ 49 ], and growth and maturation [ 33 ] reveals that NATs play fundamental roles in all biological processes.…”

“…To date, few articles have devoted attention to antisense transcription in sugarcane. Sugarcane transcriptomes were obtained to study sense and antisense expression in different tissues [ 33 , 82 , 151 ], in circadian regulation [ 79 ], and development [ 33 , 43 ]. Additionally, high-throughput data on sugarcane NATs were investigated under drought conditions [ 44 , 80 ].…”

“…In order to update the antisense expression scenario in sugarcane, we explored transcriptomic data from multiple published experiments. Eight published experiments ( Table 1 ) used the same oligo array [ 44 ] to study the gene expression of different sugarcane genotypes under greenhouse [ 44 , 79 , 80 , 81 ] or field conditions [ 33 , 82 , 83 , 84 ] and treatments such as drought and ethylene pulverization. This customized oligo array (CaneRegNet—Agilent Technologies) includes 21,901 probes in duplicate, which represent 14,522 different sugarcane-assembled sequences (SAS) from the SUCEST database (Sugarcane Expressed Sequence Tag project) [ 85 ].…”

“…These transcripts have been identified in several plant species playing different biological roles, for instance, in plant development or response to biotic or abiotic stresses [ 21 , 23 , 30 , 31 , 32 , 33 ]. However, most of the cis-NAT identified in plants must be characterized.…”

Integrated Metabolomics and Transcriptome Analyses Unveil Pathways Involved in Sugar Content and Rind Color of Two Sugarcane Varieties

“…In related study, Chen et al (2018) detected 68 metabolites belonging to 11 metabolite classes, which varied considerably among the different tissues of Tieguanyin Tea cultivar using untargeted metabolomics. Wijma et al (2021) also identified a high quantity of biosynthesis of secondary metabolites, amino acid metabolism, xenobiotics biodegradation and metabolism in different tissues of sugarcane. In sugarcane plants, several studies have been conducted using metabolomic analysis to study different biological problems.…”