Abstract
BackgroundConsuming watercress is thought to provide health benefits as a consequence of its phytonutrient composition. However, for watercress there are currently limited genetic resources underpinning breeding efforts for either yield or phytonutritional traits. In this paper, we use RNASeq data from twelve watercress accessions to characterize the transcriptome, perform candidate gene mining and conduct differential expression analysis for two key phytonutritional traits: antioxidant (AO) capacity and glucosinolate (GLS) content.ResultsThe watercress transcriptome was assembled to 80,800 transcripts (48,732 unigenes); 71 % of which were annotated based on orthology to Arabidopsis. Differential expression analysis comparing watercress accessions with ‘high’ and ‘low’ AO and GLS resulted in 145 and 94 differentially expressed loci for AO capacity and GLS respectively. Differentially expressed loci between high and low AO watercress were significantly enriched for genes involved in plant defence and response to stimuli, in line with the observation that AO are involved in plant stress-response. Differential expression between the high and low GLS watercress identified links to GLS regulation and also novel transcripts warranting further investigation. Additionally, we successfully identified watercress orthologs for Arabidopsis phenylpropanoid, GLS and shikimate biosynthesis pathway genes, and compiled a catalogue of polymorphic markers for future applications.ConclusionsOur work describes the first transcriptome of watercress and establishes the foundation for further molecular study by providing valuable resources, including sequence data, annotated transcripts, candidate genes and markers.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12864-016-2704-4) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Consuming watercress is thought to provide health benefits as a consequence of its phytonutrient composition
Sequencing and de novo assembly Watercress accessions from the University of Southampton germplasm collection were grown under standard commercial conditions in the U.K, as described previously [33]
Considered at the gene sequence level and not taken through to translation, our findings suggest well-conserved gene sequences between Arabidopsis and watercress in the phenylpropanoid pathway and represent an immediately useful catalogue of important genes likely contributing to the AO crop trait
Summary
Consuming watercress is thought to provide health benefits as a consequence of its phytonutrient composition. For watercress there are currently limited genetic resources underpinning breeding efforts for either yield or phytonutritional traits. The consumption of Brassicaceae vegetables is suggested to benefit human health as a consequence of their phytochemical composition, which includes high concentrations of glucosinolates (GSL) [2,3,4]. Over the past few decades, a growing number of studies suggest that watercress consumption supports health by providing chemopreventive, antioxidant and anti-inflammatory benefits. The consumption of watercress by adults limited exercise-induced DNA damage [11] and increased blood antioxidants [12, 13]. It was ranked as the top “powerhouse fruit and vegetable” with the strongest link to decreased occurrence of chronic disease [14], ranking highly because it contains an array of both essential nutrients as well as non-essential health-promoting phytochemicals
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