Abstract
Background: Rice eating quality and nutritional quality is affected by both grain development and the post-harvesting process, but the dynamic metabolite changes among rice cultivars during these processes are unclear.Results: We successfully identified 623 metabolites in four indica cultivars with different eating qualities using a widely-targeted metabolomics approach, and found that the metabolic variation became increasingly smaller and differed according to the stage and cultivar during grain development and post-harvesting. Our results suggested that the levels of sugars, amino acids, lipids, and flavones demonstrated cultivar-specific changes during grain development, and sufficient carbon supply during grain development may contribute to the formation of excellent eating quality. We further found that most of the metabolites, especially the nutritional metabolites, decreased significantly or even lost, whereas only few increased during post-harvesting, further indicating that the post-harvesting process reduced the metabolic molecular differences between rice cultivars with different eating qualities, and had an even greater influence on metabolites than genetic factors.Conclusions: We found that a large number of metabolites changed significantly in the rice cultivars during grain development and the post-harvesting process, which facilitates further study of rice quality formation and has potential application in eating quality and nutritional quality improvement.
Metabolic variation between japonica and indica rice cultivars as revealed by non-targeted metabolomics
