Nitrogen-use efficiency (NUE) has significant impacts on plant growth and development. NUE in plants differs substantially in physiological resilience to nitrogen stress; however, the molecular mechanisms underlying enhanced resilience of high-NUE plants to nitrogen deficiency remains unclear. We compared transcriptome-wide gene expression between high-NUE and low-NUE ramie (Boehmeria nivea (L.) Gaudich) genotypes under nitrogen (N)-deficient and normal conditions to identify the transcriptomic expression patterns that contribute to ramie resilience to nitrogen deficiency. Two ramie genotypes with contrasting NUE were used in the study, including T29 (NUE = 46.01%) and T13 (NUE = 15.81%). Our results showed that high-NUE genotypes had higher gene expression under the control condition across 94 genes, including frontloaded genes such as GDSL esterase and lipase, gibberellin, UDP-glycosyltransferase, and omega-6 fatty acid desaturase. Seventeen stress-tolerance genes showed lower expression levels and varied little in response to N-deficiency stress in high-NUE genotypes. In contrast, 170 genes were upregulated under N deficiency in high-NUE genotypes but downregulated in low-NUE genotypes compared with the controls. Furthermore, we identified the potential key genes that enable ramie to maintain physiological resilience under N-deficiency stress, and categorized these genes into three groups based on the transcriptome and their expression patterns. The transcriptomic and clustering analysis of these nitrogen-utilization-related genes could provide insight to better understand the mechanism of linking among the three gene classes that enhance resilience in high-NUE ramie genotypes.
Keywords: nitrogen deficiency; nitrogen-use efficiency; ramie (Boehmeria nivea (L.) Gaudich); resilience; transcriptome.