Key message
The first transcriptome coupled to metabolite analyses reveals major trends during acerola fruit ripening and shed lights on ascorbate, ethylene signalling, cellular respiration, sugar accumulation, and softening key regulatory genes.
Abstract
Acerola is a fast growing and ripening fruit that exhibits high amounts of ascorbate. During ripening, the fruit experience high respiratory rates leading to ascorbate depletion and a quickly fragile and perishable state. Despite its growing economic importance, understanding of its developmental metabolism remains obscure due to the absence of genomic and transcriptomic data. We performed an acerola transcriptome sequencing that generated over 600 million reads, 40,830 contigs, and provided the annotation of 25,298 unique transcripts. Overall, this study revealed the main metabolic changes that occur in the acerola ripening. This transcriptional profile linked to metabolite measurements, allowed us to focus on ascorbate, ethylene, respiration, sugar, and firmness, the major metabolism indicators for acerola quality. Our results suggest a cooperative role of several genes involved in AsA biosynthesis (PMM, GMP1 and 3, GME1 and 2, GGP1 and 2), translocation (NAT3, 4, 6 and 6-like) and recycling (MDHAR2 and DHAR1) pathways for AsA accumulation in unripe fruits. Moreover, the association of metabolites with transcript profiles provided a comprehensive understanding of ethylene signalling, respiration, sugar accumulation and softening of acerola, shedding light on promising key regulatory genes. Overall, this study provides a foundation for further examination of the functional significance of these genes to improve fruit quality traits.
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Data availability
The sequencing project has been deposited at the SRA database under the accession number PRJNA473364. The acerola reference transcriptome has been deposited at DDBJ/EMBL/GenBank under the accession GHDH00000000.1.
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This research was supported by CNPq, CAPES, FUNCAP and INCT- Frutos Tropicais (4653352014-4). CPS acknowledge doctoral grants from CNPq. JHC is grateful to CNPq for the Researcher fellowship (CNPq grant 309795/2017-6).
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This study was performed by the help of all authors. CPS and JHC conceived, designed and drafted the manuscript. CPS performed the experiments with help of KDCS, ALMR, RSM and LMAS. CPS performed the bioinformatics analysis of the transcriptomic data with the help of MCB. EGAF carried out the chemometrics analysis on 1H NMR data. CFHM helped with scientific advices in the design of field experiments. KMC helped in the design of 1H NMR assays, and with critical review of the manuscript.
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dos Santos, C.P., Batista, M.C., da Cruz Saraiva, K.D. et al. Transcriptome analysis of acerola fruit ripening: insights into ascorbate, ethylene, respiration, and softening metabolisms. Plant Mol Biol 101, 269–296 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11103-019-00903-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11103-019-00903-0