Transcriptomic Analysis of Leaf in Tree Peony Reveals Differentially Expressed Pigments Genes

Abstract

Tree peony (Paeonia suffruticosa Andrews) is an important traditional flower in China. Besides its beautiful flower, the leaf of tree peony has also good ornamental value owing to its leaf color change in spring. So far, the molecular mechanism of leaf color change in tree peony is unclear. In this study, the pigment level and transcriptome of three different color stages of tree peony leaf were analyzed. The purplish red leaf was rich in anthocyanin, while yellowish green leaf was rich in chlorophyll and carotenoid. Transcriptome analysis revealed that 4302 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were upregulated, and 4225 were downregulated in the purplish red leaf vs. yellowish green leaf. Among these DEGs, eight genes were predicted to participate in anthocyanin biosynthesis, eight genes were predicted involved in porphyrin and chlorophyll metabolism, and 10 genes were predicted to participate in carotenoid metabolism. In addition, 27 MYBs, 20 bHLHs, 36 WD40 genes were also identified from DEGs. Anthocyanidin synthase (ANS) is the key gene that controls the anthocyanin level in tree peony leaf. Protochlorophyllide oxido-reductase (POR) is the key gene which regulated the chlorophyll content in tree peony leaf.

Comparative transcriptomics characterized the distinct biosynthetic abilities of terpenoid and paeoniflorin biosynthesis in herbaceous peony strains

“…Recently, transcriptome studies on a large number of plant species with complex genomes, such as smooth cordgrass (Spartina alterniflora) (Bedre et al, 2016), buckwheat (Lu et al, 2018), and Caraganakor shinskii (Li et al, 2016b), have been carried out. Transcriptome assembly is currently a feasible and cost-efficient technology to globally identify genes in the P. lactiflora genome because genome information is unavailable (Luo et al, 2017a(Luo et al, , 2017b. In our study, we identified 36,264 unigenes.…”

“…High throughput sequencing technologies have revolutionized genomic and transcriptomic studies. Improved algorithms are now available for de novo reassembly of the transcriptome of a non-model plant species without a valid reference genome sequence (Luo et al, 2017b). In this study, we assembled the transcriptome of roots and shoots derived from the three strains of P. lactiflora using de novo assembly analysis.…”

Comparative transcriptome and coexpression network analysis of carpel quantitative variation in Paeonia rockii

“…Then this study is the first attempt to combine two generations of RNA-seq methods to explore the carpel quantitative variation in Paeonia. Compared with the previous reports concerned about tree peonies, we present a higher quality sequencing products [50][51][52][53][54]. For example, more than 60% of the sequence reads are 1000~3500 bp, and the longest ones are over 5000 bp.…”

Peer Review #1 of "Virus-induced gene silencing in the perennial woody Paeonia ostii (v0.1)"

“…Primers were designed to amplify the PoPDS coding sequence based on transcriptome data during leaf development of P. suffruticosa Andrews (Luo et al, 2017). PCR was conducted using Taq DNA polymerase (Invitrogen, USA).…”