Abstract
BackgroundTall fescue (Festuca arundinacea Schreb.) is major cool-season forage and turf grass species worldwide, but high-temperature is a major environmental stress that dramatically threaten forage production and turf management of tall fescue. However, very little is known about the whole-genome molecular mechanisms contributing to thermotolerance. The objectives of this study were to analyzed genome-wide gene expression profiles in the leaves of two tall fescue genotypes, heat tolerant ‘PI578718’ and heat sensitive ‘PI234881’ using high-throughput RNA sequencing.ResultsA total of 262 million high-quality paired-end reads were generated and assembled into 31,803 unigenes with an average length of 1,840 bp. Of these, 12,974 unigenes showed different expression patterns in response to heat stress and were categorized into 49 Gene Ontology functional subcategories. In addition, the variance of enrichment degree in each functional subcategory between PI578718 and PI234881 increased with increasing treatment time. Cell division and cell cycle genes showed a massive increase in transcript abundance in heat-stressed plants and more activated genes were detected in PI 578718 by Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathways analysis. Low molecular weight heat shock protein (LMW-HSP, HSP20) showed activated in two stressed genotypes and high molecular weight HSP (HMW-HSP, HSP90) just in PI578718. Assimilation such as photosynthesis, carbon fixation, CH4, N, S metabolism decreased along with increased dissimilation such as oxidative phosphorylation.ConclusionsThe assembled transcriptome of tall fescue could serve as a global description of expressed genes and provide more molecular resources for future functional characterization analysis of genomics in cool-season turfgrass in response to high-temperature. Increased cell division, LMW/HMW-HSP, dissimilation and antioxidant transcript amounts in tall fescue were correlated with successful resistance to high temperature stress.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/1471-2164-15-1147) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Tall fescue (Festuca arundinacea Schreb.) is major cool-season forage and turf grass species worldwide, but high-temperature is a major environmental stress that dramatically threaten forage production and turf management of tall fescue
Larkindale et al [8,9] reported that each of 45 Arabidopsis mutants had different responses to high temperature, which were involved in signaling pathways [abscisic acid (ABA), ethylene (ET), salicylic acid (SA), calcium, oxidative burst] and reactive oxygen metabolism
The results of this study described the gene-level transcriptome in response to heat stress conditions in two tall fescue genotypes differing in high-temperature tolerance
Summary
Tall fescue (Festuca arundinacea Schreb.) is major cool-season forage and turf grass species worldwide, but high-temperature is a major environmental stress that dramatically threaten forage production and turf management of tall fescue. The objectives of this study were to analyzed genome-wide gene expression profiles in the leaves of two tall fescue genotypes, heat tolerant ‘PI578718’ and heat sensitive ‘PI234881’ using high-throughput RNA sequencing. Heat tolerance of plants is a complex multigenic process with different regulatory mechanisms sets throughout the gene network during plant development [6,7]. Many researches on heat-stress tolerance have advanced considerably in recent years, genome-wide comparisons in plants have not yet been made using the next-generation high-throughput sequencing technologies. Determining the multigenic net regulatory mechanisms of plant response to high temperature, at the transcriptomic level, will be helpful in the development of heat-tolerant species
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