Abstract
Kiwifruit (Actinidia chinensis var. deliciosa (A Chev) Liang et Ferguson) is a sub-tropical vine species from the Actinidiaceae family native to China. This species has an allohexaploid genome (from diploid and autotetraploid parents), contained in 174 chromosomes producing a climacteric and fleshy fruit called kiwifruit. Currently, only a small body of transcriptomic and proteomic data are available for A. chinensis var. deliciosa. In this low molecular knowledge context, the main goal of this study is to construct a tissue-specific de novo transcriptome assembly, generating differential expression analysis among these specific tissues, to obtain new useful transcriptomic information for a better knowledge of vegetative, floral and fruit growth in this species. In this study, we have analyzed different whole transcriptomes from shoot, leaf, flower bud, flower and fruit at four development stages (7, 50, 120 and 160 days after flowering; DAF) in kiwifruit obtained through RNA-seq sequencing. The first version of the developed A. chinensis var. deliciosa de novo transcriptome contained 142,025 contigs (x¯ = 1044 bp, N50 = 1133 bp). Annotation was performed with BLASTX against the TAIR10 protein database, and we found an annotation proportion of 35.6% (50,508), leaving 64.4% (91,517) of the contigs without annotation. These results represent a reference transcriptome for allohexaploid kiwifruit generating a database of A. chinensis var. deliciosa genes related to leaf, flower and fruit development. These results provided highly valuable information identifying over 20,000 exclusive genes including all tissue comparisons, which were associated with the proteins involved in different biological processes and molecular functions.
Highlights
Actinidia chinensis var. deliciosa is an allohexaploid species (2n = 6x) with an estimated genome size of 4.4 Gbp and 174 chromosomes [1,2,3]
The objective of this work was the development of a de novo transcriptome in greenfleshed kiwifruit ‘Hayward’ using RNA sequencing (RNA-seq) analysis from the leaf, flower and fruit tissues in different development phases, including a differential gene expression analysis to generate a database of genes related to the leaf, flower and fruit development and to identify the most important proteins involved in these development processes
When comparing all the replicates and tissues with filters of the false discovery rate (FDR) ≥ 0.005 and FC ≥ 4, we found around 49,000 differential expressed genes (Figure 2)
Summary
It is a species that originated in southwestern China and belongs to the genus Actinidia, which includes at least 76 species [4]. This species has an important economic role due to its edible fruit known as kiwifruit, being a species of nutritional importance due to its high level of vitamin C [5]. The kiwifruit worldwide production in 2019 reached about 4.35 million tons, China being the most important producer, followed by New Zealand, Italy, Iran, Greece and Chile. Most of the Chinese kiwifruit are locally consumed, with less than 0.2% of the total being exported (http://faostat.fao.org (accessed on 4 January 2021)). The Actinidia genus is mainly composed of dioecious plants. The flowers are axial with five petals, usually white colored, and sepals that can be fused with the base or not
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