Integrative Identification of Crucial Genes Associated With Plant Hormone-Mediated Bud Dormancy in Prunus mume

Ping Li; Tangchun Zheng; Zhiyong Zhang; Weichao Liu; Like Qiu; Jia Wang; Tangren Cheng; Qixiang Zhang

doi:10.3389/fgene.2021.698598

Integrative Identification of Crucial Genes Associated With Plant Hormone-Mediated Bud Dormancy in Prunus mume

Front Genet. 2021 Jul 6:12:698598. doi: 10.3389/fgene.2021.698598. eCollection 2021.

Authors

Ping Li^{1

2}, Tangchun Zheng^{1

2}, Zhiyong Zhang³, Weichao Liu^{1

2}, Like Qiu^{1

2}, Jia Wang^{1

2}, Tangren Cheng^{1

2}, Qixiang Zhang^{1

2}

Affiliations

¹ Beijing Key Laboratory of Ornamental Plants Germplasm Innovation & Molecular Breeding; National Engineering Research Center for Floriculture; Beijing Laboratory of Urban and Rural Ecological Environment; Engineering Research Center of Landscape Environment of Ministry of Education; Key Laboratory of Genetics and Breeding in Forest Trees and Ornamental Plants of Ministry of Education, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing, China.
² School of Landscape Architecture, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing, China.
³ Department of Hematology, The Second Affiliated Hospital, Guangzhou Medical University, Guangzhou, China.

Abstract

Prunus mume is an important ornamental woody plant with winter-flowering property, which is closely related to bud dormancy. Despite recent scientific headway in deciphering the mechanism of bud dormancy in P. mume, the overall picture of gene co-expression regulating P. mume bud dormancy is still unclear. Here a total of 23 modules were screened by weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA), of which 12 modules were significantly associated with heteroauxin, abscisic acid (ABA), and gibberellin (GA), including GA1, GA3, and GA4. The yellow module, which was positively correlated with the content of ABA and negatively correlated with the content of GA, was composed of 1,426 genes, among which 156 transcription factors (TFs) were annotated with transcriptional regulation function. An enrichment analysis revealed that these genes are related to the dormancy process and plant hormone signal transduction. Interestingly, the expression trends of PmABF2 and PmABF4 genes, the core members of ABA signal transduction, were positively correlated with P. mume bud dormancy. Additionally, the PmSVP gene had attracted lots of attention because of its co-expression, function enrichment, and expression level. PmABF2, PmABF4, and PmSVP were the genes with a high degree of expression in the co-expression network, which was upregulated by ABA treatment. Our results provide insights into the underlying molecular mechanism of plant hormone-regulated dormancy and screen the hub genes involved in bud dormancy in P. mume.

Keywords: ABA; Prunus mume; co-expression network; dormancy; expression and function.