Quantification of hormones and profiling of metabolites from vegetative to reproductive growth phase shift in Lagenaria siceraria (Molina) Standl

In the world of agricultural research, there has been a lot of emphasis on increasing insight into the decline of crop yield gap levels. Metabolomics is a relatively recent approach that aims to better understand the metabolic networks and is extensively being applied to agricultural research for its divergent growth and productivity by enhancing the behavior of plants under various stress. Lagenaria siceraria (Bottle gourd - Salad variety) has commonly been used because of its enormous nutritional, commercial, and medicinal benefits. The purpose of this investigation was to quantify the level of endogenous hormones and metabolites profiling at the vegetative and reproductive phase from various tissues of L. siceraria by liquid chromatography-tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS) and gas chromatography-mass spectrometry (GC-MS). The field-grown plant samples such as vegetative, male, and female flower-initiated parts including leaf, stem, tendril, and shoot apex were used for this study. The vegetative tissues had the highest level of trans zeatin and indole-3-acetic acid whereas indole-3propanoic acid, trans zeatin, and gibberellic acid-3 were seen highest in the male flower-initiated tissues, and the level of IPA alone was found highest in the female flower-initiated tissues quantified by LC-MS/MS method. Additionally, N-Methyl-N-trimethylsilyl-trifluoroacetamide derivatized tissues showed the presence of astaxanthin and 1H-Indole, 2,3,5-trimethyl-1-(trimethylsilyl)-in vegetative tissues. On the contrary, kaur-16-ene(813,1313), an intermediate of GAs synthesis, gibberellic acid, and fumaric acid were recorded in reproductive tissues by GC-MS analysis. The first principal component analysis (PCA) biplot revealed two principal components that together accounted for 34.59 % and 22.96 % of the variance in the tissues of vegetative and reproductive phases respectively. In the second PCA biplot, the male and female flower-initiated tissues showed principal component levels of 42.94 % and 26.48 %, respectively. Also, the heat map analysis showed the fluctuation of phytohormone levels during both phases.