Integrative Analysis of Flavonoid Pathways in Rice: Enhancing Heat Tolerance

Background Plants tend to produce special metabolites to resist biotic or abiotic invasions, in which flavonoid-mediated defense responses play an important role. Result In our previous work, the rel1 -D mutant was obtained by T-DNA insertion. Nearly all ZH11 died after 42 ℃ treatment, while nearly half of the mutants survived. By transcriptomic and metabolomic analysis of leaves, 1184 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) and 126 differentially accumulated metabolites (DAMs) were identified, most of these DEGs and DAMs were enriched in biosynthesis-related pathways such as the L-Phenylalanine pathway, flavonoid biosynthesis pathway and phenol pathway. Furthermore, a correlation network involved phenotypic traits was constructed based on the genes and metabolites. Conclusion Potential genes regulated by REL1 and flavonoid metabolites were identified. REL1 may affect the accumulation of flavonoid metabolites by regulating the expression of key genes in flavonoid biosynthesis pathway to influence the heat tolerance of rice.