Lin Zhong, Erxi Liu, Chaozhu Yang, Ying Diao, Nunung Harijati, Jiangdong Liu, Zhongli Hu, Surong Jin
Amorphophallus is a perennial herbaceous plant species mainly distributed in the tropics or subtropics of Asia and Africa. It has been used as a traditional medicine for a long time and now is utilized for the pharmaceutical, chemical and agriculture industries as a valued economic crop. Recently, Amorphophallus has attracted tremendous interest because of its high ceramide content. However, the breeding and genome studies are severely limited by the arduous whole genome sequencing of Amorphophallus. In this study, the transcriptome data of A. muelleri was obtained by utilizing the high-throughput Illumina sequencing platform. Based on this information, the majority of the significant genes involved in the proposed sphingolipid metabolic pathway were identified. Then, the full-length neutral ceramidase cDNA was obtained with the help of its candidate transcripts, which were acquired from the transcriptome data. Furthermore, we demonstrated that this neutral ceramidase was a real ceramidase by eukaryotic expression in the yeast double knockout mutant Δypc1 Δydc1, which lacks the ceramidases—dihydroCDase (YDC1p), phytoCDase (YPC1p). In addition, the biochemical characterization of purified A. muelleri ceramidase (AmCDase) exhibited classical Michaelis-Menten kinetics with an optimal activity ranging from pH 6.5 to 8.0. Based on our knowledge, this study is the first to report the related information of the neutral ceramidase in Amorphophallus. All datasets can provide significant information for related studies, such as gene expression, genetic improvement and application on breeding in Amorphophallus. © 2018 Zhong et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
State Key Laboratory of Hybrid Rice, College of Life Sciences, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China; Institute of Konjac, Enshi Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Enshi, Hubei, China; Lotus Engineering Research Center of Hubei Province, College of Life Sciences, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China; Department of Biology, Faculty of Mathematics and Natural Sciences, Brawijaya University, Jl. Veteran, Malang, Indonesia; College of Life Science, Department of Biology, College of Life Sciences, Wuhan University, Wuhan, Hubei, China; Institute of Chemical and Life Science, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, Hubei, China
