Abstract
BackgroundRamie (Boehmeria nivea L.), popularly known as “China grass”, is one of the oldest crops in China and the second most important fiber crop in terms of area sown. Ramie fiber, extracted from the plant bast, is important in the textile industry. However, the molecular mechanism of ramie fiber development remains unknown.ResultsA whole sequencing run was performed on the 454 GS FLX + platform using four separately pooled parts of ramie bast. This generated 1,030,057 reads with an average length of 457 bp. Among the 58,369 unigenes (13,386 contigs and 44,983 isotigs) that were generated through de novo assembly, 780 were differentially expressed. As a result, 13 genes that belong to the cellulose synthase gene family (four), the expansin gene family (three) and the xyloglucan endotransglucosylase/hydrolase (XTH) gene family (six) were up-regulated in the top part of the bast, which was in contrast to the other three parts. The identification of these 13 concurrently up-regulated unigenes indicated that the early stage (represented by the top part of the bast) might be important for the molecular regulation of ramie fiber development. Further analysis indicated that four of the 13 unigenes from the expansin (two) and XTH (two) families shared a coincident expression pattern during the whole growth season, which implied they were more relevant to ramie fiber development (fiber quality, etc.) during the different seasons than the other genes.ConclusionsTo the best of our knowledge, this study is the first to characterize ramie fiber development at different developmental stages. The identified transcripts will improve our understanding of the molecular mechanisms involved in ramie fiber development. Moreover, the identified differentially expressed genes will accelerate molecular research on ramie fiber growth and the breeding of ramie with better fiber yields and quality.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.1186/1471-2164-15-919) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.
Highlights
Ramie (Boehmeria nivea L.), popularly known as “China grass”, is one of the oldest crops in China and the second most important fiber crop in terms of area sown
De novo assembly of the transcriptome library The read lengths of four separately pooled samples, which were evenly distributed throughout the ramie stem, as well as the overall assembled sequences, are shown in Table 1 and Additional file 1
Considering the importance of xyloglucan-cellulose cross links in modulating the strength and extensibility of the primary plant cell wall, which is a key feature of classical models of this composite structure [44,45] and that xyloglucan endo-transglycosylase activity, along with expansins, are the primary catalyst in cell wall loosening [43], we suggest that the early ramie fiber developmental stages were more sensitive to molecular regulation, which was reflected by the up-regulations of expansin and xyloglucan endotransglucosylase/hydrolase (XTH) genes
Summary
Ramie (Boehmeria nivea L.), popularly known as “China grass”, is one of the oldest crops in China and the second most important fiber crop in terms of area sown. Ramie fiber, extracted from the plant bast, is important in the textile industry. Ramie fiber, generated from the stem bast, is an important natural fiber in the textile industry because of the ability to retain shape, reduce wrinkling and introduce a silky luster to the appearance of a fabric [1]. The flaws, such as resistance to dyeing,. The growth period of ramie fiber could be roughly divided into initiation, fast growth and maturation stages. Previous studies had extracted the fiber of flax from stem bark [15,16], which we followed as the sampling method
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