Transcriptomic profiling during the post-harvest of heat-treated Dixiland Prunus persica fruits: common and distinct response to heat and cold

LAUXMANN, MARTÍN ALEXANDER; BRUN, BIANCA; BORSANI, JULIA; BUSTAMANTE, CLAUDIA; BUDDE, CLAUDIO OLAF; LARA, MARÍA VALERIA; DRINCOVICH, MARÍA FABIANA

PLOS ONE

PUBLIC LIBRARY SCIENCE

Lugar: San Francisco; Año: 2012 vol. 7 p. 1 - 16

1932-6203

Cold storage is extensively used to slow the rapid deterioration of peach (Prunus persica L. Batsch) fruit after harvest.However, peach fruit subjected to long periods of cold storage develop chilling injury (CI) symptoms. Post-harvest heattreatment (HT) of peach fruit prior to cold storage is effective in reducing some CI symptoms, maintaining fruit quality,preventing softening and controlling post-harvest diseases. To identify the molecular changes induced by HT, which may beassociated to CI protection, the differential transcriptome of peach fruit subjected to HT was characterized by thedifferential display technique. A total of 127 differentially expressed unigenes (DEUs), with a presence-absence pattern, wereidentified comparing peach fruit ripening at 20uC with those exposed to a 39uC-HT for 3 days. The 127 DEUs were dividedinto four expression profile clusters, among which the heat-induced (47%) and heat-repressed (36%) groups resulted themost represented, including genes with unknown function, or involved in protein modification, transcription or RNAmetabolism. Considering the CI-protection induced by HT, 23-heat-responsive genes were selected and analyzed duringand after short-term cold storage of peach fruit. More than 90% of the genes selected resulted modified by cold, from whichnearly 60% followed the same and nearly 40% opposite response to heat and cold. Moreover, by using available Arabidopsismicroarray data, it was found that nearly 70% of the peach-heat responsive genes also respond to cold in Arabidopsis, eitherfollowing the same trend or showing an opposite response. Overall, the high number of common responsive genes to heatand cold identified in the present work indicates that HT of peach fruit after harvest induces a cold response involvingcomplex cellular processes; identifying genes that are involved in the better preparation of peach fruit for cold-storage andunraveling the basis for the CI protection induced by HT.