Evolution of a plant gene cluster in Solanaceae and emergence of metabolic diversity
- Michigan State University, United States
- Ohio State University, United States
Abstract
Plants produce phylogenetically and spatially restricted, as well as structurally diverse specialized metabolites via multistep metabolic pathways. Hallmarks of specialized metabolic evolution include enzymatic promiscuity and recruitment of primary metabolic enzymes and examples of genomic clustering of pathway genes. Solanaceae glandular trichomes produce defensive acylsugars, with sidechains that vary in length across the family. We describe a tomato gene cluster on chromosome 7 involved in medium chain acylsugar accumulation due to trichome specific acyl-CoA synthetase and enoyl-CoA hydratase genes. This cluster co-localizes with a tomato steroidal alkaloid gene cluster and is syntenic to a chromosome 12 region containing another acylsugar pathway gene. We reconstructed the evolutionary events leading to this gene cluster and found that its phylogenetic distribution correlates with medium chain acylsugar accumulation across the Solanaceae. This work reveals insights into the dynamics behind gene cluster evolution and cell-type specific metabolite diversity.
Data availability
The RNA-seq reads were deposited in the National Center for Biotechnology Information Sequence Read Archive under the accession number PRJNA605501. Sequence data used in this study are in the GenBank/EMBL data libraries under these accession numbers: Sl-AACS1(MT078737), Sl-AECH1(MT078736), Sp-AACS1(MT078735), Sp-AECH1(MT078734), Sq-AACS1(MT078732), Sq-AECH1(MT078731), Sq_c35719 (MT078733). The following materials require a material transfer agreement: pEAQ-HT, pK7WG, pKGWFS7, pEarleyGate102, pEarleyGate104, pTRV2-LIC, pICH47742::2x35S-5'UTR-hCas9(STOP)-NOST, pICH41780, pAGM4723, and pICSL11024.
Article and author information
Author details
Federica Brandizzi
Funding
National Science Foundation (1546617)
- Shin-Han Shiu
- Robert L Last
National Science Foundation (1655386)
- Shin-Han Shiu
U.S. Department of Energy (BER DE-SC0018409)
- Shin-Han Shiu
National Science Foundation (1727362)
- Federica Brandizzi
National Institutes of Health (GM110523)
- Bryan J Leong
- Robert L Last
National Science Foundation (1757043)
- Rachel Combs
- Robert L Last
National Science Foundation (1811055)
- Craig A Schenck
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2020, Fan et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
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Evolution of a plant gene cluster in Solanaceae and emergence of metabolic diversity
eLife 9:e56717.
https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.56717
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