Fullerenol affect pea seed germination

There is considerable interest in nano materials-based agriculture due to the potential impact in crop productivity and protection. Studies showed that carbon-based nanomaterial (CBNMs) treatment can largely affect the seed germination at transcriptional and metabolic level, but few studies have focused on chromatin remodeling. Alteration of chromatin accessibility play an important role in abiotic stress, but the changes in chromatin accessibility when seed applied with CBNMs are not well understood. Fullerenol, a carbon-based nanomaterial, have a great potential in agriculture with unclear effect on plants. In this study, we found that fullerenol can penetrate seed coat of pea but not common bean and cowpea, and increase low seed germination of pea caused by osmotic stress. RNA-seq showed that expression of oxidoreductase activity related genes decreased when fullerenol was applied suggesting that fullerenol could alleviate oxidative stress caused by osmotic stress. The expression of some transcription factor family members is also affected by fullerenol application. Transposase Accessible Chromatin with high-throughput sequencing (ATAC-seq) showed that epigenetic regulation of genes involved in environmental signal, transcriptional regulation, metabolism have changed when fullerenol was applied. Thus, our study showed that fullerenol can alleviate osmotic stress at physiological, transcriptional and epigenetic level, which providing a new perspective for evaluating the efficacy and safety of this nanomaterial.