Mutation Mechanism of Leaf Color in Plants: A Review

Color mutation is a common, easily identifiable phenomenon in higher plants. Color mutations usually affect the photosynthetic efficiency of plants, resulting in poor growth and economic losses. Therefore, leaf color mutants have been unwittingly eliminated in recent years. Recently, however, with the development of society, the application of leaf color mutants has become increasingly widespread. Leaf color mutants are ideal materials for studying pigment metabolism, chloroplast development and differentiation, photosynthesis and other pathways that could also provide important information for improving varietal selection. In this review, we summarize the research on leaf color mutants, such as the functions and mechanisms of leaf color mutant-related genes, which affect chlorophyll synthesis, chlorophyll degradation, chloroplast development and anthocyanin metabolism. We also summarize two common methods for mapping and cloning related leaf color mutation genes using Map-based cloning and RNA-seq, and we discuss the existing problems and propose future research directions for leaf color mutants, which provide a reference for the study and application of leaf color mutants in the future.