Click here to view fulltext PDF

Permanent link:
https://www.ias.ac.in/article/fulltext/jbsc/045/0129

Characteristic secondary metabolites; novel gene mining; protein functional network; tea plant

Modeling a protein functional network in concerned species is an efficient approach for identifying novel genesin certain biological pathways. Tea plant (Camellia sinensis) is an important commercial crop abundant innumerous characteristic secondary metabolites (e.g., polyphenols, alkaloids, alkaloids) that confer tea qualityand health benefits. Decoding novel genes responsible for tea characteristic components is an important basisfor applied genetic improvement and metabolic engineering. Herein, a high-quality protein functional networkfor tea plant (TeaPoN) was predicted using cross-species protein functional associations transferring andintegration combined with a stringent biological network criterion control. TeaPoN contained 31,273 nonredundantfunctional interactions among 6,634 tea proteins (or genes), with general network topologicalproperties such as scale-free and small-world. We revealed the modular organization of genes related to themajor three tea characteristic components (theanine, caffeine, catechin) in TeaPoN, which served as strongevidence for the utility of TeaPoN in novel gene mining. Importantly, several case studies regarding geneidentification for tea characteristic components were presented. To aid in the use of TeaPoN, a concise webinterface for data deposit and novel gene screening was developed (http://teapon.wchoda.com). We believe thatTeaPoN will serve as a useful platform for functional genomics studies associated with characteristic secondarymetabolites in tea plant.

SHIHUA ZHANG¹ YONG MA² RUI ZHANG² XIAOLONG HE³ YING CHEN³ JINGKE DU³ CHI-TANG HO⁴ YOUHUA ZHANG² GUOMIN HAN⁵ XIAOYI HU⁶

1. College of Life Science and Health, Wuhan University of Science and Technology, Wuhan, China
2. College of Information and Computer Science, Anhui Agricultural University, Hefei, China
3. State Key Laboratory of Tea Plant Biology and Utilization, Anhui Agricultural University, Hefei, China
4. Department of Food Science, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA
5. College of Life Science, Anhui Agricultural University, Hefei, China
6. School of Forestry and Landscape Architecture, Anhui Agricultural University, Hefei, China

Published

15 October 2020

• 12038_2020_101_MOESM1_ESM.xlsx
• 12038_2020_101_MOESM2_ESM.tif