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Sexual plasticity describes an organism’s ability to change its phenotypic sex in response to environmental, chemical or physiological cues without a change in sex chromosome karyotype.Cannabis sativaL. (cannabis) is a medically important dioecious crop, with a pair of heteromorphic XY sex chromosomes. Cannabis has demonstrated sexual plasticity in response to chemical treatments which target the biosynthesis and signalling of ethylene. To date, ethylene biosynthesis and signalling has not been specifically studied inC. sativa,and the role of ethylene-related genes (ERGs) in sexual plasticity in the species has not been investigated. In the present study, we performed gene orthology analysis based on the model speciesArabidopsis thalianaL. to reconstruct theC. sativaYang Cycle, ethylene biosynthesis and ethylene signalling pathways, whose canonical composition appear conserved in cannabis. Additionally, we employ two transcriptomic datasets containing male, female and chemically induced male flowers to investigate patterns of expression for ethylene-related genes which may be involved in sexual plasticity. Comparison of these transcriptomes highlighted CsERGs whose differential expression was associated with sexual determination and those which we propose are associated with the sexual plasticity. These sexual plasticity ERGs could be classified into two patterns of expression: karyotype concordant (KC) and unique (uERG). We show that CsERGs involved in sexual plasticity are distributed throughout the genome and are not exclusive to the sex chromosomes, suggesting a broad control of sexual plasticity inC. sativa. |
