Expression profiles of genes and enzymes related to ascorbic acid metabolism in fruits of Ziziphus jujuba Mill. ‘Jinsixiaozao’

Abstract

The fruit of Chinese jujube (Ziziphus jujuba) possesses extremely high concentrations of ascorbic acid (AsA). The accumulation of AsA, the expression patterns of the nine genes related to AsA metabolism as well as the activities of five enzymes involved in AsA synthesis, oxidation and recycling were investigated during fruit development in Z. jujuba Mill. ‘Jinsixiaozao’. The results showed that the high level of AsA accumulation in jujube fruit is due to a contribution from both AsA biosynthesis and AsA recycling. It is suggested that L-galactono-1,4-lactone dehydrogenase, ascorbate peroxidase and monodehydro-ascorbate reductase are the crucial genes/enzymes of jujube AsA synthesis, oxidization and recycling, respectively. These results provide useful new insights into the regulatory mechanisms of AsA accumulation in Chinese jujube.

Keywords

Chinese jujube / ascorbic acid / metabolism / gene / enzyme

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by grants from the National Science and Technology Support Plan of China (2013BAD14B03), Agricultural University of Hebei Foundation for Leaders of Disciplines in Science Technology, Top-notch Talent Support Project of Hebei Province, and Youth Foundation of Hebei Educational Committee (QN2015232).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Yingying Chen, Zhihui Zhao, Jin Zhao, Mengjun Liu declare that they have no conflict of interest or financial conflicts to disclose.

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2016. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)