Project description:Brassica oleracea and Brassica napus are comprised of diverse cultivars that collectively constitute an important global food source. Of those, the Brassica oleracea convar. acephala cultivar group containing var. sabellica and var. palmifolia and Brassica napus var. pabularia, collectively known as kale, are nutritious leafy greens consumed for their abundance of vitamins and micronutrients. Typified by their curly, serrated or wavy leaves, kale varieties have been primarily defined based on their leaf morphology and geographic origin, despite maintaining complex genetic backgrounds. With changes in the diel molecular environment directly tied to multiple agronomic traits across the food production landscape (e.g. time-of-day nutritional content) and kale representing a candidate crop for vertical farming, we selected nine diverse kale varieties encompassing a wide swath of consumer kale varieties for growth under LED lights using precise real-world dawn/dusk growth conditions followed by quantitative GC-MS metabolomic and LC-MS proteomic analyses. With plant growth and development driven by the day-to-day molecular activities of plants, we harvested kale leaf tissue at end-of-day (ED) and end-of-night (EN) time-points for all metabolomic and proteomic analyses. Our results reveal that kale forms 2 distinct groups, defined by their diel metabolome and proteome signatures primarily involving amino acids and sugars along, with proteome changes in carbon and nitrogen metabolism, mRNA splicing, protein translation and light harvesting. Together, our analysis have derived robust quantitative insights into the diel growth and development landscape of kale, significantly advancing our fundamental understanding of this nutritious leafy green for next-generation breeding and biotechnology.
Project description:Arthrobacter chlorophenolicus A6 is a 4-chlorophenol degrading soil bacterium with high phyllosphere colonization capacity. Till now the genetic basis for the phyllosphere competency of Arthrobacter or other pollutant-degrading bacteria is uncertain. We investigated global gene expression profile of A. chlorophenolicus grown in the phyllosphere of common bean (Phaseolus vulgaris) compared to growth on agar surfaces.