ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Plant Sci.
Sec. Plant Metabolism and Chemodiversity
Mining the candidate transcription factors modulating dendrobine biosynthesis under phosphate deficiency in Dendrobium officinale Kimura & Migo
Provisionally accepted
- Zhejiang Provincial TCM Key Laboratory of Chinese Medicine Resource Innovation and Transformation, School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Zhejiang Chinese Medical University, Hangzhou 310053, China, Hangzhou, China
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Phosphorus is integral to energy transfer and structural integrity in plants, which plays a significant role in regulating secondary metabolism. Notably, low phosphorus (LP) stress significantly improves dendrobine content in Dendrobium officinale, yet the molecular basis for this induction remains unclear. This study employed transcriptomic analysis to identify the differentially expressed genes (DEGs) related to the dendrobine biosynthesis under LP stress in D. officinale. 1,713, 222, 488, and 174 DEGs were up-regulated among the different phosphorus treatment groups, including the HP (high phosphorus) vs TP (total phosphorus), MP (medium phosphorus) vs TP, LP (low phosphorus) vs TP and NP (no phosphorus) vs. TP, respectively. In contrast, 1,855, 195, 432, and 120 DEGs exhibited a down-regulated expression pattern between each of them, respectively. Gene annotation in public datasets revealed that the DEGs related to phosphate transporter and alkaloid biosynthesis were enriched in D. officinale. By co-expression analysis, 10 phosphorus transport-related transcription factors (TFs) and 21 TFs associated with dendrobine biosynthesis were mined from the D. officinale transcriptome. These above findings provide many candidate TFs related to dendrobines biosynthesis and new insights into dissecting the potential molecular mechanism on regulating dendrobine biosynthesis under LP stress in D. officinale.
Keywords: Dendrobine biosynthesis, Dendrobium officinale Kimura & Migo, Phosphate-deficiency stress, Transcription Factors, Transcriptome
Received: 10 Jan 2026; Accepted: 04 Feb 2026.
Copyright: © 2026 Gui, Wu, Shi, Zhuang, Zhong, Zou, Du and Zhou. 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:
Hui Du
Wei Zhou
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