Integrated transcriptomics and metabolomics reveal the role of soluble sugars and GABA in rice leaf response to Pb...

Heavy metals as environmental pollutants pose a major threat to agroecosystems and crop quality. Among them, Pb is one of the most common heavy metal pollutants, which not only inhibits plant growth and nutrient uptake, but also disrupts the expression of genes, affects the accumulation of metabolites, and even causes plant death. We investigated a joint transcriptomics and metabolomics analysis to study the response of rice seedlings to Pb stress. Our results showed that Pb stress inhibited the growth of rice seedlings. Meanwhile, Pb stress decreased SPAD values, chlorophyll fluorescence parameters, antioxidant enzyme activities, and GSH and TGSH contents, but increased ASC and TASC contents and reactive oxygen species levels in rice leaves. Using the MetaboAnalyst website for metabolites enrichment analysis, 7 metabolic pathways involving 36 differentially expressed metabolites (DAMs) were affected. Transcriptomics analysis revealed that 1873 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) identified were mainly involved in 16 metabolic pathways. Comprehensive enrichment analysis of DAMs and DEGs showed that alanine, aspartate and glutamate metabolism as well as starch and sucrose metabolism were the co-enriched pathways and were upregulated under Pb stress. The main metabolites involving soluble sugars (cellobiose, D-glucose, trehalose and maltose) and gamma-aminobutyric acid (GABA). These findings suggest that rice leaves enhance tolerance to Pb by upregulating the expression of genes involved in carbohydrate and amino acid metabolism, increasing accumulation of soluble sugars and GABA. The results of this study will contribute to understanding the molecular mechanisms of rice response to Pb stress and provide a basis for screening rice varieties with high resistance to heavy metals.