Jasmonic acid regulates the biosynthesis of medicinal metabolites via the JAZ9-MYB76 complex in Salvia miltiorrhiza

Abstract

Jasmonic acid (JA) signaling pathway plays an important role in tanshinone and phenolic acid biosynthesis in Salvia miltiorrhiza. However, the specific regulatory mechanism remains largely unclear. Previous work showed that a JASMONATE ZIM-domain (JAZ) protein, SmJAZ9, acted as a repressor of tanshinone production in S. miltiorrhiza. In this study, we revealed that SmJAZ9 reduced both phenolic acid accumulation and related biosynthetic gene expression, confirming that SmJAZ9 also negatively affected phenolic acid biosynthesis. Then, we identified a novel MYB transcription factor, SmMYB76, which interacted with SmJAZ9. SmMYB76 repressed phenolic acid biosynthesis by directly downregulating SmPAL1, Sm4CL2, and SmRAS1. Further investigation demonstrated that JA mediated phenolic acids biosynthesis via SmJAZ9-SmMYB76 complex. Taken together, these findings state the molecular mechanism that SmJAZ9-SmMYB76 regulated phenolic acid biosynthesis at the transcriptional and protein levels, which provided new insights into JA signaling pathway regulating plant metabolism.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (82073963, 81522049); The Key Science and Technology Projects of Breeding New Varieties of Agriculture in Zhejiang Province (2021C02074-3); Zhejiang Provincial Ten Thousands Program for Leading Talents of Science and Technology Innovation (2018R52050); Zhejiang Provincial Program for the Cultivation of High-level Innovative Health Talents; and the Research Project of Zhejiang Chinese Medical University (2021JKZDZC06).

Author contributions

G.Y.K. and X.H.G. conceived the initial screening and research plan. S.C.L., M.S. and M.H.S. designed the experiments. S.C.L. and X.K.G. performed most of experiments and analysed the data. Other authors assisted in experiments and discussed the results. S.C.L. drafted the manuscript. M.S. and C.W. contributed to the revision of the article. G.Y.K., I.M., and X.H.G. participated in revising the article. All authors reviewed and approved the manuscript.

Data availability

All data can be obtained from the corresponding author.

Conflict of interest statement

The authors have declared no conflict of interest.

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