Alfalfa Flower Color Metabolomic and Transcriptomic Profiles

Integrated metabolomic and transcriptomic data profiles five alfalfa flower types, from white to four shades of purple. The study quantifies anthocyanin and carotenoid contents via LC-ESI-MS/MS and identifies 580 common significant differentially expressed genes (CSDEGs) from RNA-seq analysis. It was authored by Hongqi Du and published on figshare in 2026.

Use Cases

• Correlate delphinidin-3,5-O-diglucoside and malvidin-3,5-O-diglucoside anthocyanin content with gene expression levels across five flower types.
• Analyze the 108 CSDEGs showing regular expression trends to identify key transcription factors like MYB and bHLH involved in pigment regulation.
• Investigate the 29 CSDEGs definitively involved in the anthocyanin biosynthesis chain to model the purple color gradient formation mechanism.
• Use the identified pigment ratios (blue to red) and anthocyanin contents to train models predicting flower color phenotype from metabolite data.

Strengths

• Data integrates two omics layers: metabolomics quantifying specific anthocyanins and transcriptomics identifying 580 common significant DEGs.
• Focuses on a specific biological gradient, profiling five distinct flower color types from white to dark purple.
• Published under a permissive CC BY 4.0 license, facilitating open reuse and redistribution.

Limitations

• The dataset is small in file size (756.2 KB), indicating limited raw data scope, likely containing summary or processed results rather than full sequencing reads.
• Specific column names, row counts, and sample-level data are unavailable, limiting direct analytical utility without the source publication.
• Geographic origin and precise temporal coverage of the biological samples are not specified, limiting reproducibility in other contexts.

Provenance

Source

figshare, authored by Hongqi Du.

Collection Method

Integrated analysis using LC-ESI-MS/MS for metabolomics and RNA-seq mapped to the Medicago reference genome for transcriptomics.

Freshness

Last updated in 2026.