ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Plant Bioinformatics
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpls.2025.1612434
This article is part of the Research TopicBioinformatics and Beyond: Exploring the Health Benefits of Bioactive Metabolites from PlantsView all articles
Identification of chalcone isomerase gene family in Astragalus mongholicus revealed genes regulating isoflavone synthesis
Provisionally accepted
- Heilongjiang University of Chinese Medicine, Harbin, China
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Astragalus mongholicus (AM) is the original plant of the famous traditional Chinese medicine Astragali Radix, and its isoflavones are important bioactive substances with wide-ranging medicinal values. The chalcone isomerase (CHI) serves a pivotal function in flavonoid synthesis.However, the CHI gene family in AM has not yet been characterized and systematically analyzed. The present study identified a number of eight AmCHIs distributed on five chromosomes and classified them into four types. The evolutionary relationships, conserved motifs, gene structures, and cis-elements of AmCHIs are discussed. The transcriptome revealed the expression profiles of the AmCHI genes in roots, stems and leaves. In order to characterize AmCHIs function, recombinant proteins AmCHI3, AmCHI4 and AmCHI5 were expressed in Escherichia coli, and the enzyme activity assay showed that the typeI AmCHI4 could only catalyze naringenin chalcone to chalcone, and the typeII AmCHI3 catalyzed the conversion of naringenin chalcone to chalcone and of isoliquiritigenin to Liquiritigenin. Type III AmCHI5 lacked catalytic activity. In addition, gene suppression of AmCHI3 was carried out by using antisense oligodeoxynucleotides (AsODN). Transient gene silencing of AmCHI3 decreased the contents of calycosin, calycosin-7-glucoside and formononetin. indicating that AmCHI3 gene has a positive regulatory effect on the synthesis of isoflavonoids in AM. These results provide the 3 data support for future elucidation of the regulatory mechanism of CHI in isoflavone biosynthesis.
Keywords: Astragalus mongholicus, Chalcone isomerase, Expression pattern, Prokaryotic expression, AsDON
Received: 15 Apr 2025; Accepted: 28 Jul 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Wang, Wang, Wang, Kong, Wu, Ren, Liu and Ma. 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: Wei Ma, Heilongjiang University of Chinese Medicine, Harbin, China
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