Ribosome profiling reveals the effects of nitrogen application translational regulation of yield recovery after abrupt drought-flood alternation in rice

• Published in: Plant physiology and biochemistry Vol. 155; pp. 42 - 58
• Main Authors: Xiong, Qiangqiang, Zhong, Lei, Du, Jie, Zhu, Changlan, Peng, Xiaosong, He, Xiaopeng, Fu, Junru, Ouyang, Linjuan, Bian, Jianmin, Hu, Lifang, Sun, Xiaotang, Xu, Jie, Zhou, Dahu, Cai, Yicong, Fu, Haihui, He, Haohua, Chen, Xiaorong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: France Elsevier Masson SAS 01.10.2020
• Subjects: Abrupt drought-flood alternation; Droughts; Floods; Nitrogen; Nitrogen - administration & dosage; Nitrogen - metabolism; Open Reading Frames; Oryza - genetics; Oryza - growth & development; Protein Biosynthesis; Ribosome profiling; Ribosomes - metabolism; RNA-seq; Translation efficiency; uORFs; Translation efficiency; uORFs; Abrupt drought-flood alternation; RNA-seq; Nitrogen; Ribosome profiling
• ISSN: 0981-9428; 1873-2690
• DOI: 10.1016/j.plaphy.2020.07.021

Abrupt drought-flood alternation is a frequent meteorological disaster during the summer in Southern China. The study of physiological and translation mechanisms of rice yield recovery after abrupt drought-flood alternation has great potential benefits in field production. Our results showed that yield recovery upon nitrogen (N) application after abrupt drought-flood alternation was due to the increase in effective panicle numbers per plant. The N application resulted in the regulation of physiological and biochemical as well as growth development processes, which led to a rapid growth recovery effect after abrupt drought-flood alternation stress in rice. Using ribosome profiling combined with RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) technology, the interactions between transcription and translation for N application after abrupt drought-flood alternation were analyzed. It was found that a small proportion of response genes were shared at the transcriptional and translational levels, that is, 14% of the expressed genes were upregulated and 6.6% downregulated. Further analysis revealed that the translation efficiency (TE) of the genes was influenced by their sequence characteristics, including their GC content, coding sequence length and normalized minimal free energy. Compared with the number of untranslated upstream open reading frames (uORFs), the increased number of translated uORFs promoted the improvement of TE. The TE of the uORFs for N application was lower than the control without N application after abrupt drought-flood alternation. This study characterizes the translational regulatory pattern in response to N application after abrupt drought-flood alternation stress. •The main reason for the yield recovery when nitrogen (N) application after abrupt drought-flood alternation was the number of effective panicle number per plant increased.•N application after abrupt drought-flood alternation can improve leaf photosynthesis and promote dry matter production and N absorption.•The activities of the antioxidant enzymes SOD, POD, CAT and the N metabolism-related enzymes NR, GS, GDH were greatly improved.•Compared with that of untranslated uORFs, the increased number of translated uORFs improved the translation efficiency.