Abstract
Picrorhiza kurroa Royle ex Benth is a valuable medicinal herb of North-Western Himalayas due to presence of two major bioactive compounds, picroside-I and picroside-II used in the preparation of several hepatoprotective herbal drugs. These compounds accumulate in stolons/rhizomes; however, biosynthesized in different organs, viz., picroside-I in shoots and picroside-II in roots. As of today, no information exists on what transporters are transporting these metabolites from shoots and roots to the final storage organ, stolon, which ultimately transforms into rhizome. The ATP-binding cassette (ABC) transporters are reported to transport majority of secondary metabolites, including terpenoids in plants, therefore, we mined P. kurroa transcriptomes to identify and shortlist potential candidates. A total of 99 ABC transporter-encoding transcripts were identified in 3 differential transcriptomes, PKSS (shoots), PKSTS (stolons), and PKSR (roots) of P. kurroa, based on in silico comparative analysis and transcript abundance. 15 of these transcripts were further validated for their association using qRT-PCR in shoots, roots and stolon tissues in P. kurroa accessions varying for picroside-I and picroside-II contents. Organ-specific expression analysis revealed that PkABCA1, PkABCG1, and PkABCB5 had comparatively elevated expression in shoots; PkABCB2 and PkABCC2 in roots; PkABCB3 and PkABCC1 in stolon tissues of P. kurroa. Co-expression network analysis using ABC genes as hubs further unravelled important interactions with additional components of biosynthetic machinery. Our study has provided leads, first to our knowledge as of today, on putative ABC transporters possibly involved in long distance and local transport of picrosides in P. kurroa organs, thus opening avenues for designing a suitable genetic intervention strategy.
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source organ to sink organ in Picrorhiza kurroa
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Acknowledgements
The authors are thankful to the Department of Biotechnology, Ministry of Science and Technology, Government of India, for providing research grant in the form of program support on high-value medicinal plants to Dr. R. S. Chauhan. RP is thankful to Research and Information System for Developing Countries – Forum of Indian Traditional Medicine, Ministry of Ayush for providing the fellowship.
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The work presented here was carried out in collaboration between all authors. Rajinder S. Chauhan and Roma Pandey defined the research theme and co-designed the experiments, wrote the manuscript, and discussed analyses. Ashish Sharma has done in silico network analysis. Hemant Sood has given useful suggestions for conducting research work. Roma Pandey has carried out the laboratory experiments and analyzed the data.
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Pandey, R., Sharma, A., Sood, H. et al. ABC transporters mined through comparative transcriptomics associate with organ-specific accumulation of picrosides in a medicinal herb, Picrorhiza kurroa. Protoplasma 260, 453–466 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00709-022-01786-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00709-022-01786-7