ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Plant Metabolism and Chemodiversity
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2025.1588888
This article is part of the Research TopicExploring Volatile Organic Compounds in Fruits and Flowers: Aroma, Biosynthesis, and Ecological ImpactView all 7 articles
Integrated Metabolomics and Metagenomics Reveal Plant-Microbe Interactions Driving Aroma Differentiation in Flue-Cured Tobacco Leaves
Provisionally accepted
Yifan Jia1
Jianwei Wang2Xiaojie Lin1
Taibo Liang2
Huaxin Dai2
Baojian Wu2
Mengmeng Yang2Yanling Zhang2
Ruifang Li1*- 1Henan University of Technology, Zhengzhou, China
- 2Zhengzhou Tobacco Research Institute of CNTC, Zhengzhou, Henan Province, China
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A comprehensive study investigating the relationship among tobacco metabolite profiles, microbial communities, and tobacco aromas was conducted. Untargeted metabolomics analysis of the flue-cured upper tobacco leaves showed that the sugar metabolite levels in light aromatic tobacco (LAT) were significantly higher than those in strong aromatic tobacco (SAT), while the levels of specific acids and amino acid metabolites in SAT exceeded those in LAT. Redundancy analysis (RDA) and metabolomic correlation analyses indicated that the genera Methylorubrum and Pseudomonas may promote sugar metabolite accumulation, while Pseudokineococcus potentially regulates both sugar and acid metabolites. In contrast, Methylobacterium and Sphingomonas were associated with acid and amino acid metabolism, with Methylobacterium additionally showing inhibitory effects on sugar metabolism. Metagenomic analysis revealed that the genera Methylorubrum, Pseudomonas and Pseudokineococcus were abundant in LAT, whereas Methylobacterium and Sphingomonas were abundant in SAT. Notably, the bidirectional regulation of aromatic metabolites by microbial genera such as Pseudokineococcus highlights the universality of plant-microbe interactions in shaping plant metabolic networksa mechanism potentially applicable to other crop systems. These findings reveal conserved microbial functional traits (e.g., metabolic pathway modulation) that may drive plant phenotype differentiation beyond tobacco, offering insights into microbiome-mediated crop quality improvement. The results provide theoretical guidance for tobacco aging and aroma regulation and underscore the broader significance of microbial community engineering in agricultural systems for manipulating plant metabolic outputs.
Keywords: Flue-cured tobacco, aroma, untargeted metabolomics, Metagenomics, Plant-microbe interaction
Received: 06 Mar 2025; Accepted: 01 May 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Jia, Wang, Lin, Liang, Dai, Wu, Yang, Zhang and Li. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Ruifang Li, Henan University of Technology, Zhengzhou, China
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