Abstract
BackgroundThe dioecious system is relatively rare in plants. Shrub willow is an annual flowering dioecious woody plant, and possesses many characteristics that lend it as a great model for tracking the missing pieces of sex determination evolution. To gain a global view of the genes differentially expressed in the male and female shrub willows and to develop a database for further studies, we performed a large-scale transcriptome sequencing of flower buds which were separately collected from two types of sexes.ResultsTotally, 1,201,931 high quality reads were obtained, with an average length of 389 bp and a total length of 467.96 Mb. The ESTs were assembled into 29,048 contigs, and 132,709 singletons. These unigenes were further functionally annotated by comparing their sequences to different proteins and functional domain databases and assigned with Gene Ontology (GO) terms. A biochemical pathway database containing 291 predicted pathways was also created based on the annotations of the unigenes. Digital expression analysis identified 806 differentially expressed genes between the male and female flower buds. And 33 of them located on the incipient sex chromosome of Salicaceae, among which, 12 genes might involve in plant sex determination empirically. These genes were worthy of special notification in future studies.ConclusionsIn this study, a large number of EST sequences were generated from the flower buds of a male and a female shrub willow. We also reported the differentially expressed genes between the two sex-type flowers. This work provides valuable information and sequence resources for uncovering the sex determining genes and for future functional genomics analysis of Salicaceae spp.
Highlights
Unlike animals, plants have no distinct germ line in the early developmental stage [1]
Most of the cucumber plants are monoecious, but can be dioecious or hermaphroditic [4,5], whereas papaya is trioecious with all three sex types, male, female, and hermaphrodite [6]
1,201,931 reads were obtained, after quality control, 1,201,628 reads were left with an average length of 389 bp and a total length of 467.96 Mb, among which 629,683 were from female flower buds and 571,945 from male flower buds (Table 1)
Summary
Plants have no distinct germ line in the early developmental stage [1]. Most of the cucumber plants are monoecious, but can be dioecious or hermaphroditic [4,5], whereas papaya is trioecious with all three sex types, male, female, and hermaphrodite [6]. The majority of plants are cosexuals [7], meaning individual plants have both sex functions, whether present within each flower (hermaphrodite), or in separate male and female flowers (monoecious). The dioecious system, with separate males and females, is the rule in most animals, but is found in only about 4% of angiosperm species [9]. To gain a global view of the genes differentially expressed in the male and female shrub willows and to develop a database for further studies, we performed a large-scale transcriptome sequencing of flower buds which were separately collected from two types of sexes
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