Editorial: Transcriptomics of fruit growth, development and ripening

Fruits are organs that hold seeds in plant species. From a botanical point of view, fruit is defined as a mature ovary (Roth, 1977), or as a structure developing from the gynoecium of one flower as the result of pollination or parthenocarpy (Bobrov and Romanov, 2019), or, additionally, as the flower in the state of seed germination (Knoll, 1939). An enormous variety of fruits with different forms, sizes, textures, colors, flavors, and aromas exists in nature (Klee, 2010; Rodríguez et al., 2012; Stournaras et al., 2012; Wu et al., 2018; Kapoor et al., 2022). Fruits are classified as fleshy or dry. Fleshy fruits are distributed in nature primarily by animals, whereas dry fruits may be dispersed by animals, wind, or water (Carey et al., 2019). Dry fruits are classified as dehiscent when they release seeds into environment (the seeds are discarded before or after consuming), or indehiscent those that release seeds in protected fruit wall propagules. Fleshy fruits are classified as climacteric (bananas, tomatoes, apricot, pears, mangoes, apricots, peaches, apples, papayas, guava, nectarines, blueberry, plum, passion fruit, cantaloupe, and avocados) or non-climacteric (grapefruit and lemon, berries such as raspberry, strawberry, cherry, grapes, pineapple, melon, watermelon, and pomegranate). In climacteric fruits, a burst of ethylene biosynthesis and an increase in respiration is observed at the onset of ripening. On the other hand, non-climacteric fruits lack the autocatalytic ethylene burst. Fruits are plant organs of nutritional value for animals and humans since they are sources of food, fiber, vitamins, minerals, carbohydrates, organic acids, amino acids, proteins, polyphenols (flavonoids and stilbenes), sterols, fatty acids, lipids, and pigments with antioxidant properties, among others (McKee and Latner, 2000; Zamora et al., 2001; Avila-Sosa et al., 2019; Wu et al., 2019; Golovinskaia and Wang, 2021; Alvi et al., 2022; Kasampalis et al., 2022; Yun et al., 2022; Bures et al., 2023; Cavalcante de Oliveira et al., 2023). Fruits are formed from single ovaries and may or may not involve inclusion of accessory floral tissues like the floral receptacle. After pollination, flowers undergo complex processes involving cell division, cell enlargement, and cell differentiation mediated by the expression of hundreds or even thousands of genes under a fine, harmonic, and sequentially regulated program to promote growth, development, ripening and, finally, senescence (Gillaspy et al., 1993; Karlova et al., 2014). Fruit initiation, growth, development, ripening, and senescence are influenced by genetic, epigenetic, hormonal, and environmental factors (Seymour et al., 2008, 2013; Chen et al., 2022). A powerful approach to study those genes expressed during the growth, development, ripening, and senescence is transcriptomics through RNA-Seq analysis (Wang et al., 2009; Tarazona et al., 2011; Trapnell et al., 2013; Li D, et al., 2022). The set of all RNA molecules transcribed in an organ or tissue at a particular point of time under a given set of environmental conditions constitute the transcriptome (Velculescu et al., 1997; Martínez-López et al., 2014). Arabidopsis thaliana and tomato (Solanum lycopersicum) have been used as model plants to investigate dry and fleshy fruit biology, respectively (Seymour et al., 2013; Gómez et al., 2014). This Research Topic focuses on transcriptomic research in different plant species revealing changes in gene expression and key regulatory gene networks involved in fruit growth, development, ripening, and senescence.

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