Abstract
Chlorophytum borivilianum, an endangered medicinal plant species is highly recognized for its aphrodisiac properties provided by saponins present in the plant. The transcriptome information of this species is limited and only few hundred expressed sequence tags (ESTs) are available in the public databases. To gain molecular insight of this plant, high throughput transcriptome sequencing of leaf RNA was carried out using Illumina's HiSeq 2000 sequencing platform. A total of 22,161,444 single end reads were retrieved after quality filtering. Available (e.g., De-Bruijn/Eulerian graph) and in-house developed bioinformatics tools were used for assembly and annotation of transcriptome. A total of 101,141 assembled transcripts were obtained, with coverage size of 22.42 Mb and average length of 221 bp. Guanine-cytosine (GC) content was found to be 44%. Bioinformatics analysis, using non-redundant proteins, gene ontology (GO), enzyme commission (EC) and kyoto encyclopedia of genes and genomes (KEGG) databases, extracted all the known enzymes involved in saponin and flavonoid biosynthesis. Few genes of the alkaloid biosynthesis, along with anticancer and plant defense genes, were also discovered. Additionally, several cytochrome P450 (CYP450) and glycosyltransferase unique sequences were also found. We identified simple sequence repeat motifs in transcripts with an abundance of di-nucleotide simple sequence repeat (SSR; 43.1%) markers. Large scale expression profiling through Reads per Kilobase per Million mapped reads (RPKM) showed major genes involved in different metabolic pathways of the plant. Genes, expressed sequence tags (ESTs) and unique sequences from this study provide an important resource for the scientific community, interested in the molecular genetics and functional genomics of C. borivilianum.
Highlights
Chlorophytum borivilianum is an important species of liliaceae family due to its exceptional medicinal properties
Since 39 ends of reads are more prone to sequencing error, so after quality check for every 50 bp read, only 48 bases were considered for further analysis
For the first time, we reported the presence of genes involved in taxol biosynthesis. 39-N-debenzoyal- 29deoxytaxol Nbenzoyaltransferase, taxane 10 - beta - hydroxylase (5-a-taxadienol-10-bhydroxylase) and deacetyl baccatin genes were discovered that are involved in taxol biosynthetic pathway
Summary
Chlorophytum borivilianum is an important species of liliaceae family due to its exceptional medicinal properties. Due to its high medicinal properties, the species has been recognized as 26th among the top priority medicinal plants to be protected and promoted by the Medicinal Plant Board, Government of India. Chlorophytum borivilianum brag the exuberant references in many Ayurvedic classics like Charka Samhita (2nd century B.C.), Sushrut Samhita (2nd century A.D.), Raja Nighantu (17th century A.D.) etc. The above attributes have made C. borivilianum an essential ingredient in Ayurvedic, Unani and Allopathic formulations. Steroidal saponins, are considered to be the principal bioactive components responsible for the pharmacological properties [5] and borivilianosides, furostane type steroidal saponins, have been isolated and characterized from this plant [6,7]
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