Anthocyanins Profiling Analysis and RNA-Seq Revealed the Dominating Pigments and Coloring Mechanism in Cyclamen Flowers

Abstract

Pigments in cyclamen (Cyclamen purpurascens) endows flowers with great ornamental and medicinal values. However, little is known about the biosynthetic pathways of pigments, especially anthocyanins, in cyclamen flowers. Herein, anthocyanins profiling and RNA-Seq were used to decipher the molecular events using cyclamen genotypes of red (HXK) or white (BXK) flowers. We found that red cyclamen petals are rich in cyanidin-3-O-rutinoside, cyanidin-3-O-glucoside, delphinidin-3-O-glucoside, malvidin-3-O-glucoside, peonidin-3-O-rutinoside, quercetin-3-O-glucoside, and ruti. In addition, our transcriptomics data revealed 3589 up-regulated genes and 2788 down-regulated genes comparing the BXK to HXK. Our rich dataset also identified eight putative key genes for anthocyanin synthesis, including four chalcone synthase (CHS, g13809_i0, g12097_i0, g18851_i0, g36714_i0), one chalcone isomerase (CHI, g26337_i0), two flavonoid 3-hydroxylase (F3′H, g14710_i0 and g15005_i0), and one anthocyanidin synthase (ANS, g18981_i0). Importantly, we found a 2.5 order of magnitude higher expression of anthocyanin 3-O-glucosyltransferase (g8206_i0), which encodes a key gene in glycosylation of anthocyanins, in HXK compared to BXK. Taken together, our multiomics approach demonstrated massive changes in gene regulatory networks and anthocyanin metabolism in controlling cyclamen flower color.