Gene-Metabolite Network Analysis Revealed Tissue-Specific Accumulation of Therapeutic Metabolites in <i>Mallotus japonicus</i>
<i>Mallotus japonicus</i> is a valuable traditional medicinal plant in East Asia for applications as a gastrointestinal drug. However, the molecular components involved in the biosynthesis of bioactive metabolites have not yet been explored, primarily due to a lack of omics resources. In...
| Main Authors: | , , , , , , , , |
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
MDPI AG
2021-08-01
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| Series: | International Journal of Molecular Sciences |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://www.mdpi.com/1422-0067/22/16/8835 |
| Summary: | <i>Mallotus japonicus</i> is a valuable traditional medicinal plant in East Asia for applications as a gastrointestinal drug. However, the molecular components involved in the biosynthesis of bioactive metabolites have not yet been explored, primarily due to a lack of omics resources. In this study, we established metabolome and transcriptome resources for <i>M. japonicus</i> to capture the diverse metabolite constituents and active transcripts involved in its biosynthesis and regulation. A combination of untargeted metabolite profiling with data-dependent metabolite fragmentation and metabolite annotation through manual curation and feature-based molecular networking established an overall metabospace of <i>M. japonicus</i> represented by 2129 metabolite features. <i>M. japonicus</i> de novo transcriptome assembly showed 96.9% transcriptome completeness, representing 226,250 active transcripts across seven tissues. We identified specialized metabolites biosynthesis in a tissue-specific manner, with a strong correlation between transcripts expression and metabolite accumulations in <i>M. japonicus</i>. The correlation- and network-based integration of metabolome and transcriptome datasets identified candidate genes involved in the biosynthesis of key specialized metabolites of <i>M. japonicus</i>. We further used phylogenetic analysis to identify 13 C-glycosyltransferases and 11 methyltransferases coding candidate genes involved in the biosynthesis of medicinally important bergenin. This study provides comprehensive, high-quality multi-omics resources to further investigate biological properties of specialized metabolites biosynthesis in <i>M. japonicus</i>. |
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| ISSN: | 1661-6596 1422-0067 |