Background
Most woody bamboos flower only once after long vegetable growth phases and die immediately afterward. It is difficult to know the timing of the floral transition, as little information is available on the molecular mechanism of plant maturity in bamboos.
Results
In this study, through RNA sequencing of leaves of D. latiflorus during floral transition and de novo assembly, a final set of 155,494 unigenes were obtained with N50 of 2,069 bp. We identified a lot of flowering time-associated and flowering integration genes and the continued increase and decrease genes were screened as flowering biomarker genes, such as MADS14, bHLH13, ABA-related genes. The different genes were assigned to specific metabolic pathways by Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) and the photoperiod pathways depending on the circadian rhythm may play an essential role in the bamboo floral transition. In addition, a total of 721 different expressed proteins of leaves from the vegetable-to-reproductive stages in the same flowering clumps were identified using iTRAQ technique. The correlations between the expression levels of a transcript and the abundance of its corresponding protein were observed infrequently, but the very strong correlation in the specific metabolic process was observed, such as carbon metabolism, sugar metabolism, and photosynthesis, underlining the importance of these metabolic pathways during floral transition.
Conclusions
In this report, we combined transcriptome with large-scale quantitative proteomes to investigate the flower transition of D. latiflorus. This work will provide insights into mechanism of floral transition for bamboos, and management of forest breeding.