Background: Sweet osmanthus (Osmanthus fragrans Lour.) is one of the top ten traditional ornamental flowers in China. The flowering time of once-flowering cultivars in O. fragrans is greatly affected by the relatively low temperature, but there are few reports on its molecular mechanism to date. A hypothesis had been raised that genes related with flower opening might be up-regulated in response to relatively low temperature in O. fragrans. Thus, our work was aimed to explore the underlying molecular mechanism of flower opening regulated by relatively low temperature in O. fragrans.
Results: The cell size of adaxial and abaxial petal epidermal cells and ultrastructural morphology of petal cells at different developmental stages were observed. The cell size of adaxial and abaxial petal epidermal cells increased gradually with the process of flower opening. Then the transcriptomic sequencing was employed to analyze the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) under different number of days' treatments with relatively low temperatures (19 °C) or 23 °C. Analysis of DEGs in Gene Ontology analysis showed that "metabolic process", "cellular process", "binding", "catalytic activity", "cell", "cell part", "membrane", "membrane part", "single-organism process", and "organelle" were highly enriched. In KEGG analysis, "metabolic pathways", "biosynthesis of secondary metabolites", "plant-pathogen interaction", "starch and sucrose metabolism", and "plant hormone signal transduction" were the top five pathways containing the greatest number of DEGs. The DEGs involved in cell wall metabolism, phytohormone signal transduction pathways, and eight kinds of transcription factors were analyzed in depth.
Conclusions: Several unigenes involved in cell wall metabolism, phytohormone signal transduction pathway, and transcription factors with highly variable expression levels between different temperature treatments may be involved in petal cell expansion during flower opening process in response to the relatively low temperature. These results could improve our understanding of the molecular mechanism of relatively-low-temperature-regulated flower opening of O. fragrans, provide practical information for the prediction and regulation of flowering time in O. fragrans, and ultimately pave the way for genetic modification in O. fragrans.
Keywords: Flower development; Petal epidermal cells; RNA-seq analysis; Sweet osmanthus; Temperature.