Suhaimi, Ahmad Husaini and Kobayashi, Masaki J. and Satake, Akiko and Ng, Ching Ching and Lee, Soon Leong and Muhammad, Norwati and Numata, Shinya and Otani, Tatsuya and Kondo, Toshiaki and Tani, Naoki and Yeoh, Suat Hui (2023) An ecological transcriptome approach to capture the molecular and physiological mechanisms of mass flowering in Shorea curtisii. PeerJ, 11. ISSN 2167-8359, DOI https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.16368.
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
Climatic factors have commonly been attributed as the trigger of general flowering, a unique community-level mass flowering phenomenon involving most dipterocarp species that forms the foundation of Southeast Asian tropical rainforests. This intriguing flowering event is often succeeded by mast fruiting, which provides a temporary yet substantial burst of food resources for animals, particularly frugivores. However, the physiological mechanism that triggers general flowering, particularly in dipterocarp species, is not well understood largely due to its irregular and unpredictable occurrences in the tall and dense forests. To shed light on this mechanism, we employed ecological transcriptomic analyses on an RNA-seq dataset of a general flowering species, Shorea curtisii (Dipterocarpaceae), sequenced from leaves and buds collected at multiple vegetative and flowering phenological stages. We assembled 64,219 unigenes from the transcriptome of which 1,730 and 3,559 were differentially expressed in the leaf and the bud, respectively. Differentially expressed unigene clusters were found to be enriched with homologs of Arabidopsis thaliana genes associated with response to biotic and abiotic stresses, nutrient level, and hormonal treatments. When combined with rainfall data, our transcriptome data reveals that the trees were responding to a brief period of drought prior to the elevated expression of key floral promoters and followed by differential expression of unigenes that indicates physiological changes associated with the transition from vegetative to reproductive stages. Our study is timely for a representative general flowering dipterocarp species that occurs in forests that are under the constant threat of deforestation and climate change as it pinpoints important climate sensitive and flowering-related homologs and offers a glimpse into the cascade of gene expression before and after the onset of floral initiation.
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Funders: | MoE-HIR [Grnt no. UM.C/625/1/HIR/MOE/SCI/18], Environment Research and Technology Development Fund [Grant no. RFd-1101], Ministry of the Environment, Japan, [Grant no. KAKENHI 26251042], Transformative Research Areas [Grant no. 23A401], Universiti Malaya's SLAB fellowship |
| Uncontrolled Keywords: | Dipterocarpaceae; Flowering time; General flowering; RNA-seq; Transcriptomics |
| Subjects: | Q Science > QH Natural history > QH301 Biology |
| Divisions: | Faculty of Science > Institute of Biological Sciences |
| Depositing User: | Ms. Juhaida Abd Rahim |
| Date Deposited: | 20 Oct 2025 14:01 |
| Last Modified: | 20 Oct 2025 14:01 |
| URI: | http://eprints.um.edu.my/id/eprint/48081 |
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