Abstract
Scutellaria viscidula Bunge (Labiatae), a perennial herb, is an important medicinal plant that possesses broad pharmacological actions. S. viscidula contains flavonoids with good bioactivities (e.g., baicalin, wogonoside, baicalein, and wogonin) mainly in its dry root, which is used as alternative to Scutellaria baicalensis in the north of China. Furthermore, S. viscidula also has flavones with interesting diverged structures such as panicolin, viscidulin I, viscidulin II, and viscidulin III. Tracing the dynamic process of gene expression will help reveal the mechanism of flavonoid synthesis in S. viscidula, as well as the 4′-deoxyflavone biosynthesis in S. baicalensis. One way is to generate and analyze the expressed sequence tags (ESTs). However, little is known on the transcriptome information of S. viscidula, particularly the key genes involved in flavonoid biosynthesis. In this study, we conducted de novo transcriptome analysis of S. viscidula and obtained 42,310,834 reads and 40,052 unigenes, respectively. We revealed 177 genes relating to flavonoid biosynthesis, where 23 key enzyme-encoding genes including CHS, CHI, F3H, PAL, and 4CL were annotated. Furthermore, we investigated the dynamic expression of SvCHS, SvCHI, SvF3H, SvMYB2, and SvbHLH of stem, root, and leaf of S. viscidula in May, July, and September. Our results showed that these key genes had important regulatory function and exhibited positive correlation with total flavonoid content in different growth stages of S. viscidula. Collectively, this study provides high-quality transcriptome data of S. viscidula, and further gives significant information for understanding the molecular mechanism of gene expression and active ingredients in Scutellaria plants.
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Acknowledgements
We would like to thank the reviewers, whose work greatly improve the manuscript. We thank Dr. Yinghua Zha for her helpful revision on the manuscript. This work was supported by the Innovation Team Project of Breeding and Standardized Production of New Varieties of Traditional Chinese Medicine in Fundamental Research Funds of the Central Universities [GK201801008 to CKB]; the National Natural Science Foundation of China [31100241 to CKB]; and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [GK201503046 to GSL].
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Communicated by M H. Walter.
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Bai, C., Xu, J., Cao, B. et al. Transcriptomic analysis and dynamic expression of genes reveal flavonoid synthesis in Scutellaria viscidula. Acta Physiol Plant 40, 161 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11738-018-2733-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11738-018-2733-5