Effect of brassinosteroids on grape berry ripening by coordinating transcriptomic and metabolic analysis

Abstract

Brassinosteroids (BRs) are essential for the regulation of plant growth, development, and stress responses. However, a comprehensive understanding of the transcriptional regulatory network governed by BRs that orchestrates grape berry ripening remains limited. Herein, the application of exogenous epibrassinolide (EBR) increased endogenous BRs content while down-regulating the expression of BRs biosynthetic genes, indicating feedback transcriptional regulation of BRs biosynthesis. EBR treatment accelerated coloring and enhanced anthocyanin accumulation, which was closely associated with the up-regulation of anthocyanin biosynthetic genes. In addition, EBR significantly increased water-soluble pectin (WSP) content and concurrently reduced protopectin and cellulose levels, resulting in berry softening. The study also delved into the intricate cross-talks between BRs and other plant growth regulators, for instance, ethylene, abscisic acid (ABA), auxin, and cytokinin. Moreover, transient overexpression of VvDWF4 (CYP90B1 steroid 22-alpha-hydroxylase) in strawberry increased BRs content, leading to anthocyanin accumulation and fruit softening. These findings provide compelling evidence that the pre-véraison application of BRs provide an effective strategy for enhancing grape berry quality.

Keywords

Grape / Brassinosteroids / Anthocyanin / Softening / Ripening / VvDWF4

Author contributions

The authors confirm contribution to the paper as follows: Project administration: Zhu X, Leng X, Gong D; formal analysis, data curation: Ren Y, Xu X, Ma Y; resources: Zhao P, Sun X, Zhang L, Zhang Z, Cui Z, Li Z; writing-review & editing: Zhu X, Leng X, Haider M; funding acquisition: Zhu X, Leng X; validation: Ren Y, Xu X, Ma Y; visualization: Liu Y, Zhu X, Leng X; investigation: Liu Y, Ji X; methodology: Liu Y, You R, Ji X; writing-original draft: Liu Y. All authors reviewed the results and approved the final version of the manuscript.

Data availability

The datasets generated during and/or analyzed during the current study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by the Key Research and Development Plan of Shandong Province (Grant Nos 2022LZGCQY019, 2023TZXD015 and 2022TZXD0011), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC) (Grant Nos 32102353, 32202449, and 32202430), the Natural Science Foundation of the Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions of China (Grant No. 24KJB210009), the Natural Science Research Project of Anhui Educational Committee (Grant No. 2024AH051983), the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu (Grant No. BK20190542), Shandong Provincial Natural Science Foundation (Grant Nos ZR2021QC005 and ZR2022QC018), Construction of genetic transformation of Grape (Grant No. SDAG2021A03), Inner Mongolia Science Technology Plan (Grant No. 2022YFDZ0029), the Unveiling and Commanding project of the West Coast new area of Qingdao (2022-23) and Qingdao Agricultural University Enterprise Cooperation Projects (Grant No. 660/2424191).

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

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