Scent biosynthesis in petunia flowers under normal and adverse environmental conditions

The ability of flowering plants to prosper throughout evolution, and for many crop plants to set fruit, is strongly dependent on their ability to attract pollinators. To that end many plants synthesize a spectrum of volatile compounds in their flowers. Scent is a highly dynamic trait that is strongly influenced by the environment. However, with high temperature conditions becoming more common, the molecular interplay between this type of stress and scent biosynthesis need to be investigated.   Using petunia as a model system, our project had three objectives: (1) Determine the expression patterns of genes encoding biosynthetic scent genes (BSGs) and of several genes previously identified as encoding transcription factors involved in scent regulation under normal and elevated temperature conditions. (2) Examine the function of petunia transcription factors and a heterologous transcription factor, PAPl, in regulating genes of the phenylpropanoid/benzenoid scent pathway. (3) Study the mechanism of transcriptional regulation by several petunia transcription factors and PAPl of scent genes under normal and elevated temperature conditions by examining the interactions between these transcription factors and the promoters of target genes.   Our work accomplished the first two goals but was unable to complete the third goal because of lack of time and resources. Our general finding was that when plants grew at higher temperatures (28C day/22C night, vs. 22C/16C), their scent emission decreased in general, with the exception of a few volatiles such as vanillin. To understand why, we looked at gene transcription levels, and saw that generally there was a good correlation between levels of transcriptions of gene specifying enzymes for specific scent compounds and levels of emission of the corresponding scent compounds. Enzyme activity levels, however, showed little difference between plants growing at different temperature regimes.   Plants expressing the heterologous gene PAPl showed general increase in scent emission in control temperature conditions but emission decreased at the higher temperature conditions, as seen for control plants. Finally, expression of several transcription factor genes decreased at high temperature, but expression of new transcription factor, EOB-V, increased, implicating it in the decrease of transcription of BSGs.   The major conclusion of this work is that high temperature conditions negatively affect scent emission from plants, but that some genetic engineering approaches could ameliorate this problem.