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Article|30 Sep 2015|OPEN
Metabolic changes upon flower bud break in Japanese apricot are enhanced by exogenous GA4
Weibing Zhuang1 , Zhihong Gao1 , , Luhua Wen1 , Ximei Huo1 , Binhua Cai1 and Zhen Zhang,1
1College of Horticulture, Nanjing Agricultural University, Nanjing 210095, China
*Corresponding author. E-mail: gaozhihong@njau.edu.cn

Horticulture Research 2,
Article number: 46 (2015)
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/hortres.2015.46
Views: 983

Received: 14 Jul 2015
Revised: 24 Aug 2015
Accepted: 24 Aug 2015
Published online: 30 Sep 2015

Abstract

Gibberellin (GA4) has a significant effect on promoting dormancy release in flower buds of Japanese apricot (Prunus mume Sieb. et Zucc). The transcriptomic and proteomic changes that occur after GA4 treatment have been reported previously; however, the metabolic changes brought about by GA4 remain unknown. The present study was undertaken to assess changes in metabolites in response to GA4 treatment, as determined using gas chromatography–mass spectrometry and principal component analysis. Fifty-five metabolites that exhibited more than two-fold differences in abundance (P < 0.05) between samples collected over time after a given treatment or between samples exposed to different treatments were studied further. These metabolites were categorized into six main groups: amino acids and their isoforms (10), amino acid derivatives (7), sugars and polyols (14), organic acids (12), fatty acids (4), and others (8). All of these groups are involved in various metabolic pathways, in particular galactose metabolism, glyoxylate and dicarboxylate metabolism, and starch and sucrose metabolism. These results suggested that energy metabolism is important at the metabolic level in dormancy release following GA4 treatment. We also found that more than 10-fold differences in abundance were observed for many metabolites, including sucrose, proline, linoleic acid, and linolenic acid, which might play important roles during the dormancy process. The current research extends our understanding of the mechanisms involved in budburst and dormancy release in response to GA4 and provides a theoretical basis for applying GA4 to release dormancy.