Analysis of differentially expressed genes and adaptive mechanisms of Prunus triloba Lindl. under alkaline stress.

Background: Prunus triloba Lindl. is a naturally salt-alkaline-tolerant plant with several unique characteristics, and it can be used as the rootstock of Chinese plum (Prunus salicina Lindl.) in saline-alkaline soils. To comprehensively investigate the alkaline acclimation mechanisms in P. triloba, a series of analyses were conducted under alkaline stress, including analyses of the kinetics of molecular and physiological changes, and leaf microstructure.

Results: To understand the kinetics of molecular changes under short-term alkaline stress, we used Illumina HiSeq 2500 platform to identify alkaline stress-related differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in P. triloba. Approximately 53.0 million high-quality clean reads were generated from 59.6 million raw reads, and a total of 124,786 unigenes were obtained after de novo assembly of P. triloba transcriptome data. After alkaline stress treatment, a total of 8948 unigenes were identified as DEGs. Based on these DEGs, a Gene Ontology (GO) enrichment analysis was conducted, suggesting that 28 genes may play an important role in the early alkaline stress response. In addition, analysis of DEGs with the Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) revealed that pathways were significant at different treatment time points. A significant positive correlation was found between the quantitative real-time PCR (qRT-PCR) results and the RNA-Seq data for seven alkaline-related genes, confirming the reliability of the RNA-Seq results. Based on physiological analysis of P. triloba in response to long-term alkaline stress, we found that the internal microstructures of the leaves of P. triloba changed to adapt to long-term alkaline stress. Various physiological indexes indicated that the degree of membrane injury increased with increasing duration of alkaline stress, affecting photosynthesis in P. triloba seedlings.

Conclusions: This represents the first investigation into the physiology and transcriptome of P. triloba in response to alkaline stress. The results of this study can enrich the genomic resources available for P. triloba, as well as deepening our understanding of molecular and physiological alkaline tolerance mechanisms in P. triloba. This will also provide new insights into our understanding of alkaline acclimation mechanisms in Chinese plum (Prunus salicina) trees.