Regulatory network of secondary metabolism in Brassica rapa: insight into the glucosinolate pathway

PLoS One. 2014 Sep 15;9(9):e107123. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0107123. eCollection 2014.

Abstract

Brassica rapa studies towards metabolic variation have largely been focused on the profiling of the diversity of metabolic compounds in specific crop types or regional varieties, but none aimed to identify genes with regulatory function in metabolite composition. Here we followed a genetical genomics approach to identify regulatory genes for six biosynthetic pathways of health-related phytochemicals, i.e carotenoids, tocopherols, folates, glucosinolates, flavonoids and phenylpropanoids. Leaves from six weeks-old plants of a Brassica rapa doubled haploid population, consisting of 92 genotypes, were profiled for their secondary metabolite composition, using both targeted and LC-MS-based untargeted metabolomics approaches. Furthermore, the same population was profiled for transcript variation using a microarray containing EST sequences mainly derived from three Brassica species: B. napus, B. rapa and B. oleracea. The biochemical pathway analysis was based on the network analyses of both metabolite QTLs (mQTLs) and transcript QTLs (eQTLs). Co-localization of mQTLs and eQTLs lead to the identification of candidate regulatory genes involved in the biosynthesis of carotenoids, tocopherols and glucosinolates. We subsequently focused on the well-characterized glucosinolate pathway and revealed two hotspots of co-localization of eQTLs with mQTLs in linkage groups A03 and A09. Our results indicate that such a large-scale genetical genomics approach combining transcriptomics and metabolomics data can provide new insights into the genetic regulation of metabolite composition of Brassica vegetables.

Publication types

  • Research Support, Non-U.S. Gov't

MeSH terms

  • Brassica rapa / genetics
  • Brassica rapa / metabolism*
  • Chromatography, Liquid
  • Flavonoids / metabolism
  • Genome, Plant
  • Glucosinolates / metabolism*
  • Mass Spectrometry
  • Metabolic Networks and Pathways*
  • Quantitative Trait Loci
  • RNA, Messenger / metabolism
  • Transcriptome

Substances

  • Flavonoids
  • Glucosinolates
  • RNA, Messenger

Grants and funding

DPDC and JK were supported by a grant of the IOP genomics program: Brassica Vegetable Nutrigenomics. RCHDV, GB and DM acknowledge the Netherlands Metabolomics Centre and the Centre for BioSystems Genomics, both of which are part of the Netherlands Genomics Initiative/Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research, for additional funding. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.