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Transcriptome analysis reveals in vitro-cultured regeneration bulbs as a promising source for targeted Fritillaria cirrhosa steroidal alkaloid biosynthesis

3 Biotech volume 8, Article number: 191 (2018) Cite this article

Abstract

The bulbs of Fritillaria cirrhosa is wildly used in traditional Chinese medicine to treat lung-related disease, which has recently been found to have antitussive, anti-inflammatory, antihypertensive and anti-tumor activity. Steroidal alkaloids are the major effective ingredients of F. cirrhosa. In the current study, we demonstrated an efficient strategy for F. cirrhosa bulb regeneration in vitro by cytokinin/auxin induction. Our data showed that the regenerated bulbs accumulated higher alkaloid content that the wild ones. We further performed RNA-seq and bioinformatics analysis to study the gene expression profile, especially those related to alkaloids biosynthesis. KEGG pathway annotation identified genes related to “Metabolic pathways” were the most abundant (2644, 26.0%), followed by those for “Biosynthesis of secondary metabolites” (1319, 13.0%) among the 113,865 unigenes identified. Further analysis suggested MEP pathway, other than MVA pathway, might be the major route for steroidal alkaloid biosynthesis of F. cirrhosa, as all the key genes in this pathway were found to be unregulated in our study. We also showed that accumulation of different phytochemicals was linked to plant hormone addition. Our current study demonstrated that in vitro cultivation is a promising strategy for mass production of F. cirrhosa steroidal alkaloids for pharmacological industry.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Dr. Nan Jiang from Ohio State University for helping us with language editing. This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of China (31600261).

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Author notes

  1. Qi Zhao and Rui Li authors contributed equally to this work.

Affiliations

  1. College of Pharmacy and Biological Engineering, Chengdu University, 1 Shiling, Chengdu, 610106, China

    Qi Zhao & Rui Li

  2. School of Medicine, Chengdu University, 1 Shiling, Chengdu, 610106, China

    Yang Zhang, Kejia Huang & Jian Li

  3. Biogas Institute of Ministry of Agriculture, Chengdu, 610041, China

    Wenguo Wang

Authors
  1. Qi Zhao
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  2. Rui Li
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  3. Yang Zhang
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  4. Kejia Huang
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  5. Wenguo Wang
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  6. Jian Li
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Contributions

Conceived and designed the experiments: WGW, JL. Performed the experiments: QZ, RL, KJH, YZ. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: WGW, JL. Wrote the paper: QZ, RL, WGW, JL. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding authors

Correspondence to Wenguo Wang or Jian Li.

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Zhao, Q., Li, R., Zhang, Y. et al. Transcriptome analysis reveals in vitro-cultured regeneration bulbs as a promising source for targeted Fritillaria cirrhosa steroidal alkaloid biosynthesis. 3 Biotech 8, 191 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13205-018-1218-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13205-018-1218-y

Keywords

  • Fritillaria cirrhosa
  • Transcriptome
  • High-throughput sequencing
  • In vitro cultures
  • Cytokinin/auxin