Catharanthus roseus has been widely cultivated around sub-tropic and the tropics, due to the pharmaceutical application in cancer cure. High temperature (≥40℃) is the commonest stress factor during growth and development of C. roseus, exerting marked influences on allocating patterns of energy in vegetative growth and reproduction process and physiological metabolisms. In this paper, life cycle forms and physiological metabolism dynamics under different temperature were determined. Investigation of principal component analysis (PCA) on 15 kinds of phenotypic characteristics, separately being related to vegetative growth, sexual and clone reproduction, was conducted. The results showed that the life cycle forms of C. roseus under high and control temperature were V0.480S0.487C0.032 and V0.604S0.385C0.010.
The investigations on some physiological metabolites, including soluble sugar, alkaloids and anti-oxidants affected by high temperature revealed that at the fourth week of treatment, there was about 7-fold elevation of sucrose content, arriving at (1.41±0.23) mg/g. The concentrations of vindoline, catharatnhine and vinblastine increased to peak values of (6.0±0.63) mg/g、(3.8±0.63) mg/g and (35.6±2.8) μg/g, 2-fold higher than the original values. The content of Glutathione (GSH) and its oxidative form GSSG were observed to be enhanced about more than 1-fold by high temperature, respectively from (153.3±11.8) nmol/g to (348.7±19.9) nmol/g, from (54.5±9.27) nmol/g to (149.2±10.1) nmol/g. While the ratio of GSH/GSSG decreased step by step during this course. These results indicated that high temperature promoted assimilation and accumulation of resources and energy allocations into sexual and clone reproductions, with repressed distributions of resources to vegetative growth. The changes of life cycle forms, at the same time, was followed with coordinated variations of primary and secondary metabolisms affected by high temperature.