**3. Discussion**

Since variation in petal color is highly prized in ornamental plant species, *P. mume* trees bearing chimeric red and white flowers have been selected during the process of genetic improvement. Floral chimerism is caused by the spatially and temporally restricted deposition of plant pigments, for instance, secondary metabolites of anthocyanins [7,25,37,52,53]. In our study, we detected Cy3G, Cy35G, and Pn3G in RT samples by HPLC-MS. The implied function of these compounds as determinants of color in red petal tissues suggests that genes related to the anthocyanin regulatory pathway, as revealed by an association analysis between transcriptomes and methylomes, are the molecular basis of chimerism in *P. mume* "Danban Tiaozhi".
