Project description:Bees make honey from the nectar that they collect from flowers. The characteristics of honey are closely associated to original botanical species. Compare with sugars in honey, proteins are minor components but usually used as an important honey quality evaluation parameters. Flower-origin proteins could be a good marker for the authentication. However, as a minute component in honey proteome, plant origin proteins are hard to be detected in honey by regular proteomic approaches, such as gel-based techniques. In this study, Eriobotrya japonica Lindl. (loquat) nectar and its derivative monofloral honey were systematically compared, especially regarding the proteomes and enzymatic activities. Using two-dimensional electrophoresis and mass spectrometry, only bee-originated proteins were detected in loquat honey which were major royal jelly proteins and two uncharacterized proteins. Xylosidase, thaumatin, and two kinds of chitinases were detected in loquat floral nectar by the gel-based proteomic approach. To our knowledge, it is the first study to analysis nectar-originated enzymes’ activity in honey and we proposed that the zymography of chitinase is a potential marker for honey botanical origin authentication.
Project description:Verbena bonariensis is a species with excellent garden plant, good environmental adaptability and great potential for future development.Cadmium has caused serious heavy metal pollution in the soil, which has posed a great threat to plant growth. In this study, Illumina sequencing technology was used to sequence the transcriptome of Verbena bonariensis leaf under normal and Cd stress, respectively. In total, 95,013 transcripts and 63021 genes with an average length of 923 bp and 1,246 bp were constructed from the clean sequence reads, respectively. And 1037 DEGs were found in response to cadmium treatment, of which 10 were selected for qRT-PCR. In conclusion, this study first identified the Verbena bonariensis as a heavy metal tolerant plant and provided the first large-scale transcriptional data set in response to cadmium stress. Our research will help to understand the mechanism of resistance to Cd in the Verbena bonariensis and provide clues for further studies on the relationships between plants and heavy metals in other Verbenaceae plants.