MYC1 role in tomato trichome development

Trichomes are hair-like structures that originated from epidermal cells and have diverse morphologies and many important functions in the Plant kingdom. Glandular trichomes have evolved as specialised biorefineries synthesising and storing a huge variety of compounds to defend the plant or regulate beneficial interactions. Many of these trichome-specific molecules are compounds with high commercial value used in medicine, agriculture, and food industry. Tomato has become an important model plant to study the development and specialised metabolism of complex trichomes. In this crop eight types of trichomes are present. Type VI are glandular trichomes that produce mostly volatile mono- and sesquiterpenes, some of which are involved in defence against insects. How the initiation, development and metabolism of this glandular trichome type are controlled is still unclear, but the transcription factor MYC1 has been identified as regulator of these processes (Xu et. al., 2018). In order to better understand how the development of type VI glandular trichomes and the production of volatile terpenes are orchestrated in tomato, a RNA-seq analysis was performed on three different MYC1 mutant lines. Candidates transcription factors acting in MYC1 regulatory network or downstream MYC1 target genes were identified between differentially expressed genes.