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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Functional and Applied Plant Genomics
Volume 15 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2024.1494339
This article is part of the Research Topic Genomics-Driven Advances in Crop Productivity and Stress Resilience View all 5 articles

Harnessing the diversity of a lettuce wild relative to identify anthocyanin-related genes transcriptionally responsive to drought stress

Provisionally accepted
Inés Medina-Lozano Inés Medina-Lozano Jérôme Grimplet Jérôme Grimplet Aurora Díaz Aurora Díaz *
  • Aragon Agrifood Research and Technology Center (CITA), Zaragoza, Spain

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    Lettuce is a crop particularly vulnerable to drought. A transcriptomic study in the variety 'Romired' and the wild relative Lactuca homblei was conducted to understand the increase in anthocyanins (only significant in L. homblei) in response to drought previously observed. RNA-seq revealed more differentially expressed genes (DEGs), especially upregulated, in the wild species, in which the most abundant and significant GO terms were involved in regulatory processes (including response to water). Anthocyanin synthesis was triggered in L. homblei in response to drought, with 17 genes activated out of the 36 mapped in the phenylpropanoid-flavonoid pathway compared to 7 in 'Romired'. Nineteen candidate DEGs with the strongest change in expression and correlation with both anthocyanin content and drought were selected and validated by qPCR, all being differentially expressed only in the wild species with the two techniques. Their functions were related to anthocyanins and/or stress response and they harboured 404 and 11 polymorphisms in the wild and cultivated species, respectively. Some wild variants had high or moderate predicted impacts on the respective protein function: a transcription factor that responds to abiotic stresses, a heat shock protein involved in stomatal closure, and a phospholipase participating in anthocyanin accumulation under abiotic stress. These genetic variants could explain the differences in the gene expression patterns between the wild (significantly up/downregulated) and the cultivated (no significant changes) species.The diversity of this crop wild relative for anthocyanin-related genes involved in the response to drought could be exploited to improve lettuce resilience against some adverse climate effects.

    Keywords: abiotic stress, Antioxidants, Crop wild relatives, Differentially expressed genes, Lactuca sativa L., real-time qPCR, RNA-Seq, resilience

    Received: 10 Sep 2024; Accepted: 23 Dec 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Medina-Lozano, Grimplet and Díaz. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Aurora Díaz, Aragon Agrifood Research and Technology Center (CITA), Zaragoza, Spain

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