Red light-transmittance bagging promotes carotenoid accumulation of grapefruit during ripening

Light, a crucial environmental signal, is involved in the regulation of secondary metabolites. To understand the mechanism by which light influences carotenoid metabolism, grapefruits were bagged with four types of light-transmitting bags that altered the transmission of solar light. We show that light-transmitting bagging induced changes in carotenoid metabolism during fruit ripening. Compared with natural light, red light (RL)-transmittance treatment significantly increases the total carotenoid content by 62%. Based on weighted gene co-expression network analysis (WGCNA), ‘blue’ and ‘turquoise’ modules are remarkably associated with carotenoid metabolism under different light treatment (p < 0.05). Transcriptomic analysis identifies transcription factors (TFs) bHLH128, NAC2-like/21/72, MYB-like, AGL11/AGL61, ERF023/062, WRKY20, SBPlike-17/73 as being involved in the regulation of carotenoid metabolism in response to RL. Under RL treatment, these TFs regulate the accumulation of carotenoids by directly modulating the expression of carotogenic genes, including GGPPS2, PDS, Z-ISO, ZDS/Z2, CRTISO3, CYP97A, CHYB, ZE2P, CCD1-2. Based on these results, a network of the regulation of carotenoid metabolism by light in citrus fruits is preliminarily proposed. These results show that RL treatments have great potential to improve coloration and nutritional quality of citrus fruits.