Fig. 3: Primary metabolic and transcriptomic responses of three studied to nutrient-deficit stress.

a, b Changes in the abundance of metabolites in the roots of paspalum (Pv), maize (Zm) and sorghum (Sb) under -N conditions (a) and -P condition (b) at 21 dap relative to plants grown under Full condition. Only the metabolites with a statistically significance change in abundance (p < 0.05; t-test; two tailed) and an absolute fold change >2 in at least one of the three species evaluated are shown. Raw data and exact p-values are included in Supplementary Data 4. c, d Change in trehalose abundance in the roots of 3-week-old plants under -N (c) and -P (d) conditions relative to control plants. Significant changes are defined as p values (t-test; two tailed) lower than 0.05 and log₂ fold change higher than 1 and are indicated in purple, and non-significant changes are indicated in gray. For a–d: N = 5 independent biological replicates consisting of pooled tissue from multiple individual plants. e Number of significantly differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in the roots of three week old plants relative to controls. Identified based on three biological replicates per species per condition, each consisting of RNA extracted from a pool of multiple plants. f, g Number of syntenically conserved orthologous triplets exhibiting shared or species-specific differential expression in response to -N (f) and -P conditions (g). h Simplified diagram of the trehalose metabolic pathway. i Expression levels of the gene encoding trehalase tre1 in the roots of 3-week-old plants, expressed in transcripts per million (TPM). N = 3 biological replicates per species per condition, each consisting of RNA extracted from a pool of multiple plants. Box plots shown in panel i is defined as in the Fig. 1 legend. Source data are provided as a Source Data file.