Metabonomic Study on the Effect of Transcriptional Factor SlNAC4 on Tomato Fruit Metabolites

In this study, SlNAC4 gene-silencing and wild-type tomato fruit were used for metabonomic investigation of tomato fruit metabolites at the breaking stage by using high performance liquid chromatography coupled to high-resolution tandem mass spectrometer (HPLC-HRMS/MS) in order to evaluate the effect of transcriptional factor SlNAC4 on tomato fruit metabolites during its ripening. The compounds were qualitatively analyzed by comparison of their mass spectral data with those in HMDB and KEGG databases as well as those of in-house reference standards using the XCMS software. The quantitative analysis and differential metabolite screening were carried out using metaX software. The results showed that a total of 67 differential metabolites that could match both the mass spectral and tandem mass spectral data (m/z) were found,including 19 amino acid derivatives and dipeptides, 7 vitamins, 4 carbohydrates and their derivatives, 11 nucleic acids and their derivatives, 4 alkaloids, 4 fl avors and 9 organic acids, 29 of which were up-regulated whereas the rest were significantly down-regulated, indicating that SlNAC4 transcriptional factors affects tomato fruit metabolism during the ripening process. © 2019, China Food Publishing Company. All right reserved.