Abstract
Polygonum minus is an herbal plant that grows in Southeast Asian countries and traditionally used as medicine. This plant produces diverse secondary metabolites such as phenolic compounds and their derivatives, which are known to have roles in plant abiotic and biotic stress responses. Methyl jasmonate (MeJA) is a plant signaling molecule that triggers transcriptional reprogramming in secondary metabolism and activation of defense responses against many biotic and abiotic stresses. However, the effect of MeJA elicitation on the genome-wide expression profile in the leaf tissue of P. minus has not been well-studied due to the limited genetic information. Hence, we performed Illumina paired-end RNA-seq for de novo reconstruction of P. minus leaf transcriptome to identify differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in response to MeJA elicitation. A total of 182,111 unique transcripts (UTs) were obtained by de novo assembly of 191.57 million paired-end clean reads using Trinity analysis pipeline. A total of 2374 UTs were identified to be significantly up-/down-regulated 24 h after MeJA treatment. These UTs comprising many genes related to plant secondary metabolite biosynthesis, defense and stress responses. To validate our sequencing results, we analyzed the expression of 21 selected DEGs by quantitative real-time PCR and found a good correlation between the two analyses. The single time-point analysis in this work not only provides a useful genomic resource for P. minus but also gives insights on molecular mechanisms of stress responses in P. minus.
Highlights
Due to the sessile lifestyle, plants have to cope with different changes of biotic/abiotic factors in their surrounding environments to survive in nature
In a previous study, using a cDNA-amplified fragment length polymorphism (AFLP) approach, Ee et al (2013) identified significant changes in gene expression of 52 transcript-derived fragments (TDFs) of P. minus leaf resulting from Methyl jasmonate (MeJA) treatment, including those involved in stress response (6) and secondary metabolic processes (1)
We found that genes related to the defense response were up- regulated, while the genes associated with growth and development processes were down-regulated upon MeJA elicitation. (Supplementary Figure S3)
Summary
Due to the sessile lifestyle, plants have to cope with different changes of biotic/abiotic factors in their surrounding environments to survive in nature. This defense response is costly and often setback by the repression of growth (Yang et al, 2012b). Plants convert resource allocation from growth to the biosynthesis of defensive compounds which is energetically demanding (Attaran et al, 2014). Plant secondary metabolites comprise a large group of lipophilic volatile organic compounds (VOCs) with high vapor pressure and low molecular weight. VOCs serve as signal molecules to mediate plant communication with their environment for herbivore deterrence, attraction of pollinators, seed dispersers, and protection against different stresses (Dudareva et al, 2013).
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