Abstract
Kentucky bluegrass (Poa pratensis L.) is a major cool-season turfgrass requiring frequent mowing. Utilization of cultivars with slow growth is a promising method to decrease mowing frequency. In this study, two dwarf mutant selections of Kentucky bluegrass (A12 and A16) induced by space mutation were analyzed for the differentially expressed genes compared with the wild type (WT) by the high-throughput RNA-Seq technology. 253,909 unigenes were obtained by de novo assembly. 24.20% of the unigenes had a significant level of amino acid sequence identity to Brachypodium distachyon proteins, followed by Hordeum vulgare with 18.72% among the non-redundant (NR) Blastx top hits. Assembled unigenes were associated with 32 pathways using KEGG orthology terms and their respective KEGG maps. Between WT and A16 libraries, 4,203 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified, whereas there were 883 DEGs between WT and A12 libraries. Further investigation revealed that the DEG pathways were mainly involved in terpenoid biosynthesis and plant hormone metabolism, which might account for the differences of plant height and leaf blade color between dwarf mutant and WT plants. Our study presents the first comprehensive transcriptomic data and gene function analysis of Poa pratensis L., providing a valuable resource for future studies in plant dwarfing breeding and comparative genome analysis for Pooideae plants.
Highlights
Kentucky bluegrass (Poa pratensis L.) is a forage crop native to Europe, Asia, North America and northern Africa [1]
Using Illumina technology, a total of 555,355,250 paired-ends reads were produced for three replicates of wild type (WT), A12 and A16, which generated 45 Gb of data
Our results showed that the GA concentration in WT was 9.20 ng.g-1F.W., which was higher than that in A12 (8.09ng.g-1F.W.) and A16 (5.43ng.g-1F.W.), indicating that the GA synthesis might be blocked in the dwarf mutants (Table 5)
Summary
Kentucky bluegrass (Poa pratensis L.) is a forage crop native to Europe, Asia, North America and northern Africa [1]. It is one of the most widely used cool-season turfgrasses in temperate and subarctic climates. Kentucky bluegrass is advantageous in excellent tolerance to low temperature, extended drought periods, good spring green-up rate and outstanding recuperative capacity [2]. Frequent mowing (about once a week) is required to keep the preferred mowing height of Kentucky bluegrass to 1.5 to 3 inches for well-maintained turf area [3]. Several plant growth regulators, such as ethephon, trinexapac-ethyl and endothal, have been developed and applied on turf to reduce or slow the growth of grasses,
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