Plant resistance inducer AMHA enhances antioxidant capacities to promote cold tolerance by regulating the upgrade of glutathione S-transferase in tea plant

Abstract

Plant resistance inducers represent an alternative strategy that mitigate stress-induced damage in plants. Previously, 2-amino-3-methylhexanoic acid (AMHA), a novel natural plant resistance inducer, was shown to significantly bolster cold tolerance, thermotolerance, and pathogen resistance in plants. However, the intricate mechanisms underlying AMHA’s response to cold stress remain elusive. Thus, we investigated the physiological and transcriptomic analyses of AMHA pretreatment on tea plant to determine its substantial role of AMHA under cold stress. The results showed that pretreatment with 100 nM AMHA effectively mitigated the detrimental effects of cold stress on photosynthesis and growth. Furthermore, differentially expressed genes were identified through RNA-seq during pretreatment, cold stress, and 2 days of recovery. These genes were mainly enriched in pathways related to flavonoid/anthocyanin, carotenoid, and ascorbic acid-glutathione (AsA-GSH) cycle, including GST (encoding glutathione S-transferase). Potential regulatory relationships between the identified genes and transcription factors were also established. Antisense oligodeoxynucleotide-silencing and overexpression experiments revealed that CsGSTU7 enhances cold resistance by maintaining redox homeostasis. In conclusion, our study suggests that antioxidant-related signaling molecules play a critical role in the signaling cascades and transcriptional regulation mediating AMHA-induced cold-stress resistance in tea plant.

Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Key R&D Program of China (2023YFD17006000), Major science and technology projects in Yunnan Province (202402AE090015), National Natural Science Foundation of China (32160729), China Agriculture Research System of MOF and MARA (CARS-19), Hainan Nongken Investment Holding Group Co., Ltd (HKKJ202426), and Suzhou science and technology project (SNG2023001), and Postgraduate Research & Practice Innovation Program of Jiangsu Province (KYCX24_0963).

Author contributions

W.F., S.C., and X.C. conceived the ideas and designed the methodology. X.C., N.Z., L.Y., Z.H., Y.G., and H.Z. performed the experiments. X.C., S.C., X.Z., J.J., Y.D., and Y. M. analyzed the data and wrote the draft. S.C., W.F., Z.Z., X. Z., and S.N.N. revised the manuscript. All authors read the manuscript.

Data availability

All relevant data in this study were provided in the article and its supplementary files. The raw sequences of RNA-seq were submitted to the NCBI Sequence Read Archive under BioProject accession number PRJCA003382.

Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Supplementary Data

Supplementary data is available at Horticulture Research online.

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