Abstract
Drought affects the growth and development of plants and can cause crop failure. As an important edible and medicinal plant, okra (Abelmoschus esculentus L. Moench) is very popular in China and shows strong resistance to drought. In this study, gene expression profiles of okra leaves were investigated under water-limited conditions at the seedling stage. A total of 94,769 unigenes with an average length of 1921 bp and an N90 of 981 bp were obtained through next-generation sequencing. Furthermore, 38.18% of total unigenes were annotated in NT, NR, COG, KEGG, and SwissProt databases. A total of 2276, 5626, 11,719, 14,892, 855, 4593, and 5170 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) in seven pairwise comparisons (A5 vs. A0; A7 vs. A0; A15 vs. A0; A20 vs. A0; A7 vs. A5; A15 vs. A7, and A20 vs. A15) were identified. Among these, 22,751 DEGs were up-regulated, and the number was slightly more than that of the down-regulated DEGs. The number of up-regulated DEGs among different samples increased with increasing drought stress. We identified that the majority of DEGs were related to “integral component of membrane”, “oxidation–reduction process”, and “metal ion binding” categories. Pathway analysis revealed that most DEGs were enriched in “Biosynthesis of secondary metabolites”, “Carbon metabolism”, and “Glycolysis/Gluconeogenesis pathways”. Additionally, a total of 17,456 simple sequence repeat motifs, 47,9831 single nucleotide polymorphisms, and 3746 transcription factors were identified in this study. RNA-Seq data were also verified by RT-qPCR. Our findings engender a further understanding of molecular mechanisms in response to drought stress.
Highlights
All reads produced from this study were deposited in the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and can be downloaded from the Short Read Archive (SRA accession: PRJNA514435) Sequence Database using the accession number
There were 94,769 unigenes with an N90 of 918 bp generated after assembling all the clean reads and filtering out lowgrade reads (p \ 2) and redundancy by using TGICL (Table S2)
Total mapped reads among the 15 samples were from 68.47 to 74.75% and the unique mapped reads of samples varied in the range of 19.38–21.54%
Summary
Moench) belongs to the Malvaceae family and is one of the most important vegetables worldwide. It is used as both a food source and a medicinal resource (Dhankhar et al 2005). Because it is rich in amino-acids, vitamins and mineral elements (iron, potassium, and calcium), okra is extremely popular today (Salameh 2014). It is grown in n India, China, Turkey, and USA. India is the largest okraplanted country, with an area of over 0.5 million ha, followed by Nigeria and Sudan, which produce 6.3 million MT per year (Varmudy 2011; Faostat 2014). Reports on the molecular mechanisms of okra are relatively few
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