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Fruit-Specific Expression of crtB, HpBHY, CrBKT and SlLCYB in a Special Tomato Landrace Triggers Hyper Production of Carotenoids in the Fruit

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Abstract

Tomato is a major source of dietary carotenoids that play an important role in human health. Improving the carotenoid profiles of tomato fruit has become a primary aspect in tomato breeding. The tomato ‘Huang Song’ landrace grows vigorously but with low contents of carotenoids in this yellowish fruit. To overcome this problem and extend lycopene to high-value astaxanthin, we co-expressed four genes encoding for phytoene synthase (crtB), β-carotene hydroxylase (BHY), β-carotene ketolase (BKT), and lycopene β-cyclase (LCYB), respectively, in the fruit of the landrace via linking the genes with 2A-sequences and driving their expression with the E8 promoter. The transgenic lines showed similar phenotypes to WT except for the fruit colors. The transgenic fruit exhibited deep red color due to the accumulation of novel ketocarotenoids including astaxanthin, canthaxanthin, and ketolutein and enhanced production of native carotenoids which were 20 ~ 44-fold of the control. The T0, T1, and T2 plants exhibited similar growing status and carotenoid profiles, indicating that the transformants were genetically stable. The transgenes resulted in upregulation of most of the endogenous carotenogenic genes in fruit at mature green stage and more plastoglobules in chromoplast. This study provides insights into metabolic engineering of tomato for enhanced production of value-added carotenoids.

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Acknowledgements

The work described in this paper was supported by a grant from Yunnan high talents program (Y33D331), Yunnan Province, China.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Economic Plants and Biotechnology, Yunnan Key Laboratory for Wild Plant Resources, Kunming Institute of Botany, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Kunming, 650201, People’s Republic of China

    Yuanyuan Lin, Mingxia He, Jielin Wang & Junchao Huang

  2. University of Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, People’s Republic of China

    Yuanyuan Lin & Jielin Wang

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  1. Yuanyuan Lin
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  2. Mingxia He
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  3. Jielin Wang
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  4. Junchao Huang
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JCH designed the experiments. YYL performed the experiments and analyzed the data. MXH and JLW performed the experiments. YYL and JCH wrote the manuscript. The authors have read and approved the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Junchao Huang.

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Lin, Y., He, M., Wang, J. et al. Fruit-Specific Expression of crtB, HpBHY, CrBKT and SlLCYB in a Special Tomato Landrace Triggers Hyper Production of Carotenoids in the Fruit. J. Plant Biol. 64, 447–459 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12374-021-09316-3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12374-021-09316-3

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