Abstract
Dragon’s blood collected from the genus Dracaena is used as a renowned traditional medicine in various cultures worldwide. However, the genetics of the genus Dracaena and the formation mechanism of dragon’s blood remain poorly understood. Here, we generate the first draft genome reference assembly of an elite Chinese Dracaena species, Dracaena cambodiana, from next-generation sequencing data with 89.46× coverage. The reads were assembled into 2,640,704 contigs with an N50 length of 1.87 kb, and a 1.05 Gb assembly was finally assembled with 2,379,659 scaffolds. Furthermore, 97.75% of the 267,243 simple sequence repeats identified from these scaffolds were mononucleotide, dinucleotide, and trinucleotide repeats. Among all 53,700 predicted genes, 158 genes involved in cell wall and plant hormone synthesis and reactive oxygen species scavenging showed altered regulation during the formation of dragon’s blood. This study provides a genomic characterization of D. cambodiana and improves understanding of the molecular mechanism of dragon’s blood formation. This report represents the first genome-wide characterization of a Dracaena species in the Asparagaceae.
Highlights
Asparagaceae is a new family derived from the Liliaceae by the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (APG) in 1998 [1]
The gene expression profiles examined in this study indicated that a chemical inducer can regulate genes encoding galactosidase, cellulase, chitinase, pectin esterase, and lyase in D. cambodiana (Fig 6A)
Consistent with previous reports [18, 19], this study further demonstrated the potential connection between the defense response and dragon’s blood formation in D. cambodiana
Summary
Asparagaceae is a new family derived from the Liliaceae by the Angiosperm Phylogeny Group (APG) in 1998 [1]. In this family, Dracaena is one of the oldest genera, and Dracaena species are used as ornamental or horticultural plants worldwide [2, 3]. An injured trunk or branch of a Dracaena plant can exude a red resin, known as dragon’s blood, which has been utilized as a traditional medicine for wounds, fractures, piles, leucorrhea, diarrhea, stomach and intestinal ulcers, and even some types of cancer in the histories of many cultures [4,5,6,7,8].
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