Abstract
BackgroundLead (Pb) is one of the most toxic heavy metal environmental pollutants. Tall fescue is an important cold season turf grass which can tolerate and accumulate substantial amount of Pb. To estimate genes related to Pb response and the molecular mechanism associated with Pb tolerance and accumulation, we analyzed the transcriptome of tall fescue in response to Pb treatment.ResultsRNA-sequencing was performed in two tall fescue cultivars, Pb tolerant Silverado and Pb sensitive AST7001. A total of 810,146 assembled unique transcripts representing 25,415 unigenes were obtained from the tall fescue leaves. Among the panel, 3,696 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were detected between the Pb treated (1000 mg/L) and untreated samples. Gene ontology (GO) and pathway enrichment analysis demonstrated that the DEGs were mainly implicated in energy metabolism, metabolism of terpenoids and polyketides, and carbohydrate metabolism related pathways. The expression patterns of 16 randomly selected genes were in consistent with that from the Solexa analysis using quantitative reverse-transcription PCR. In addition, compared to the common transcriptional response to Pb stress in both cultivars, the regulation of numerous genes including those involved in zeatin biosynthesis, limonene and pinene degradation, phagosome was exclusive to one cultivar.ConclusionsThe tall fescue assembled transcriptome provided substantial molecular resources for further genomics analysis of turfgrass in response to heavy metal stress. The significant expression difference of specific unigenes may account for Pb tolerance or accumulation in two different tall fescue cultivars. This study provided new insights for the investigation of the molecular basis of Pb tolerance and accumulation in tall fescue as well as other related turf grass species.
Highlights
Lead (Pb) is one of the most toxic heavy metal environmental pollutants
To investigate the genes involved in Pb stress response or Pb accumulation in different tall fescue cultivars, a set of cDNA libraries were constructed from total RNA isolated from leaves with or without Pb treatments
In summary, this study pioneered in providing the first large-scale transcriptome dataset in tall fescue in response to Pb stress
Summary
Lead (Pb) is one of the most toxic heavy metal environmental pollutants. As one of the most toxic non-essential elements, Pb is readily absorbed by plant roots, eventually transferred and accumulated in Recently, phytoremediation has been considered to be a promising technique to clean up the heavy metals and limit their bioactivities. This would be achieved by exploiting the super capacity of specialized plants to tolerate, translocate, and eventually accumulate inordinate amount of heavy metal elements in harvestable parts [4].
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