Preliminary Study on the Formation Mechanism of Sweet Cherry Malformed Fruits in Southern China Using Transcriptome and Metabolome Data

Planting sweet cherries in southern China has always been a problem of difficulty in bearing fruit. In recent years, the use of gibberellin has successfully solved this problem, but at the same time, there has been an increase in malformed fruits. This study mainly explores the mechanism of malformed fruit formation in sweet cherries. By analyzing the synthesis pathway of gibberellin through metabolomics and transcriptomics, the relationship between gibberellin and the formation mechanism of deformed fruit was preliminarily determined. The results showed that the content of GA3 in malformed fruits was significantly higher than that in normal fruits. The differentially expressed genes in the KEGG pathway were mainly enriched in pathways such as "plant hormone signal transduction", "diterpenoid biosynthesis", and "carotenoid biosynthesis". Through qRT-PCR analysis, the gibberellin hydrolase gene GA2Ox and gibberellin synthase genes GA20ox and GA3ox were significantly upregulated. Therefore, we speculate that the formation of malformed fruits in sweet cherries may be related to the accumulation of GA3. This lays the foundation for further research on the formation mechanism of malformed sweet cherry fruits.