Abstract
Tea plant (Camellia sinensis L.), whose leaves are the major reproductive organs, has been cultivated and consumed widely for its economic and health benefits. The Knotted1-like Homeobox (KNOX) proteins play significant roles in leaf morphology formation and development. However, the functions of KNOX proteins in tea plants are still unknown. Here, 11 CsKNOX genes from the tea plants were cloned and divided into Class I, II, and KNATM clades based on their protein sequences. These 11 CsKNOX genes were mapped on 8 out of 15 tea plant chromosomes, all localized in the nucleus. Specific spatiotemporal expression patterns of CsKNOX genes were found in various tissues and different development periods of buds, flowers, and roots of tea plants. Meanwhile, transcript levels of CsKNOX in tea leaves were strongly correlated with the accumulation of flavan-3-ols and proanthocyanidins. It was found that most of the CsKNOX genes could respond to drought, salt, cold, and exogenous MeJA and GA3 by analysis of transcriptomics data and promoter elements. The protein interaction analysis showed that CsKNOX could cooperate with CsAS1 and other critical functional proteins. In conclusion, this research provided the basic information for the functions of the CsKNOX family during organogenesis and stress response in tea plants, which was necessary for further functional characterization verification.
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All the authors thank the public databases (TPIA) for the raw data downloaded and we thank all our colleagues in the laboratory for providing useful discussions and technical assistance. We are very grateful to Prof. Yongsheng Yu for critically evaluating the manuscript and providing constructive comments for its improvement.
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This work was supported by the Chongqing Technology Innovation and Application Demonstration Project (cstc2021jscx-gksbX0016 and 2022TIAD-CUX0006) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31400583).
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LY and HT designed and supervised the project and reviewed drafts of the paper; HD conceived this study, performed all experiments, analyzed the data, and wrote the original draft manuscript; CZ provided experiment materials for expression analysis; SZ and RH collected the samples, and performed part of the experiments. LY provided suggestions for improvement of the experiments and the manuscript. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.
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Dai, H., Zheng, S., Zhang, C. et al. Identification and expression analysis of the KNOX genes during organogenesis and stress responseness in Camellia sinensis (L.) O. Kuntze. Mol Genet Genomics 298, 1559–1578 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00438-023-02075-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00438-023-02075-5