Combining resistance indicators, metabolomes and transcriptomes to reveal correlations in disease and cold resistance in tea plant and analyze the key domain NB-ARC.

Abstract

Key message: Integration of resistance indicators, metabolomes, and transcriptomes to elucidate that there is a positive correlation between disease susceptibility and cold tolerance in tea plants. The flavonoid pathway was found to be the major metabolic and transcriptional enrichment pathway. A key domain NB-ARC was identified through joint analysis, along with analysis of key domains within the NB-ARC protein. Tea is a healthy beverage and the tea plant is a woody plant rich in secondary metabolites. In the face of abnormal climate change year by year, it is important to investigate the mechanisms by which tea plants resist both biotic and abiotic stresses. In this study, we found different tea plant cultivars were evaluated for cold and disease resistance have highly correlated. Subsequently, two cold and fungal resistant cultivars were screened from a Shuixian population that had been cold domesticated for 50 years, and transcriptome and metabolome assays were performed on the two materials under cold and anthracnose stresses, using Baiye Dancong as a control. The analyses found that differential metabolites were most enriched in the flavonoid pathway and differentially expressed genes were most enriched in the pathway related to disease course after pathogen stress and cold stress. Combined metabolome and transcriptome analyses identified 30 genes that were positively correlated with flavonoid content after pathogen stress and cold stress, of which the number of genes with NB-ARC structural domains was 11, which accounted for the largest proportion. These 11 genes with NB-ARC structural domains were analyzed by family analysis and found to be highly involved in different tissues transcriptomes of tea plants, indicating the importance of the NB-ARC structural domains in biotic and abiotic stresses, and providing a theoretical basis of analysis for the subsequent related studies. In this study, through the identification of resistance in different varieties of tea plant and the multi-omics approach, we found the genes related to the key structural domain NB-ARC, which lays the foundation for the study of biologically and abiologically important mechanisms in response to the disease in tea plant.