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Analysis of cuticular wax constituents and genes that contribute to the formation of ‘glossy Newhall’, a spontaneous bud mutant from the wild-type ‘Newhall’ navel orange

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Abstract

Navel orange (Citrus sinensis [L.] Osbeck) fruit surfaces contain substantial quantities of cuticular waxes, which have important eco-physiological roles, such as water retention and pathogen defense. The wax constituents of ripe navel orange have been studied in various reports, while the wax changes occurring during fruit development and the molecular mechanism underlying their biosynthesis/export have not been investigated. Recently, we reported a spontaneous bud mutant from the wild-type (WT) ‘Newhall’ Navel orange. This mutant displayed unusual glossy fruit peels and was named ‘glossy Newhall’ (MT). In this study, we compared the developmental profiles of the epicuticular and intracuticular waxes on the WT and MT fruit surfaces. The formation of epicuticular wax crystals on the navel orange surface was shown to be dependent on the accumulation of high amounts of aliphatic wax components with trace amounts of terpenoids. In sharp contrast, the underlying intracuticular wax layers have relatively low concentrations of aliphatic wax components but high concentrations of cyclic wax compounds, especially terpenoids at the late fruit developmental stages. Our work also showed that many genes that are involved in wax biosynthesis and export pathways were down-regulated in MT fruit peels, leading to a decrease in aliphatic wax component amounts and the loss of epicuticular wax crystals, ultimately causing the glossy phenotype of MT fruits.

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Acknowledgments

This work was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Numbers 31160384 and 31460511) and the Jiangxi Provincial Natural Science Foundation (Number 20142BAB204008).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Pomology, College of Agronomy, Jiangxi Agricultural University, Nanchang, 330045, China

    Dechun Liu, Li Yang, Qiong Zheng, Yuechen Wang, Minli Wang, Xia Zhuang, Qi Wu, Shanbei Liu & Yong Liu

  2. Bureau of Fruit and Tea, Xinfeng County, 341600, Ganzhou, People’s Republic of China

    Chuanfu Liu

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  1. Dechun Liu
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  2. Li Yang
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  3. Qiong Zheng
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Correspondence to Yong Liu.

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Fig. 1

The coverage of various epicuticular wax fractions of wild-type (WT) and glossy (MT) Newhall navel orange fruits at five developmental stages. The genotype of each sample is shown in the upper right of the charts. The values are shown as the mean ± SE with three independent experiments. Single and double asterisks indicate significance at the P < 0.05 and P < 0.01 levels (TIFF 22908 kb)

Fig. 2

Relative epicuticular (a) and intracuticular (b) wax compositions of wild-type (WT) and glossy (MT) Newhall navel orange fruits of five different developmental stages (TIFF 2261 kb)

Fig. 3

The coverage of various intracuticular wax fractions of wild-type (WT) and glossy (MT) Newhall navel orange fruits at five developmental stages. The genotype of each sample is shown in the upper right of the charts. The values are shown as the mean ± SE with three independent experiments. Single and double asterisks indicate significance at the P < 0.05 and P < 0.01 levels (TIFF 23061 kb)

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Liu, D., Yang, L., Zheng, Q. et al. Analysis of cuticular wax constituents and genes that contribute to the formation of ‘glossy Newhall’, a spontaneous bud mutant from the wild-type ‘Newhall’ navel orange. Plant Mol Biol 88, 573–590 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11103-015-0343-9

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