Cell wall-related genes studies on peach cultivars with differential susceptibility to woolliness: looking for candidates as indicators of chilling tolerance

GENERO, MELINA; GISMODI, MAURO; MONTI, LAURA; GABILONDO, JULIETA; BUDDE, CLAUDIO OLAF; ANDREO, CARLOS SANTIAGO; LARA, MARÍA VALERIA; DRINCOVICH, MARÍA FABIANA; BUSTAMANTE, CLAUDIA

PLANT CELL REPORTS

SPRINGER

Lugar: Berlin; Año: 2016

0721-7714

The storage of peaches at low temperatures forprolonged periods can induce a form of chilling injury (CI)called woolliness, characterized by a lack of juiciness and amealy texture. As this disorder has been associated withabnormal cell wall dismantling, the levels of 12 transcriptsencoding proteins involved in cell wall metabolism wereanalysed in cultivars with contrasting susceptibility to thisdisorder selected from five melting flesh peach cultivars.The resistant (?Springlady?) and susceptible (?Flordaking?)cultivars displayed differences in the level of expression ofsome of the selected genes during fruit softening and inwoolly versus non-woolly fruits. From these genes, thelevel of expression of PpXyl, which encodes for a putativeb-xylosidase, was the one that presented the highest correlation(negative) with the susceptibility to woolliness.PpXyl expression was also analysed in a cultivar (?Rojo 2?)with intermediate susceptibility to woolliness, reinforcingthe conclusion about the correlation of PpXyl expression tothe presence of woolliness symptom. Moreover, the levelof expression of PpXyl correlated to protein level detectedby Western blot. Analyses of the promoter region of thePpXyl gene (1637 bp) isolated from the three cultivarsshowed no differences suggesting that cis-elements fromother regions of the genome and/or trans elements could beresponsible of the differential PpXyl expression patterns.Overall, the results obtained indicate that PpXyl may act asa good indicator of woolliness tolerance and that the regulationof expression of this gene in different cultivars doesnot depend on sequences upstream the coding sequence.