Abstract
Cycloastragenol (CAG), a molecule isolated from ‘Astragalus membranaceus’, stimulates the telomerase activity and cell proliferation significantly. It has been proven that CAG has the ability to prevent some diseases in humans. In this study, we aimed to figure out the CAG effects on the different signaling mechanisms in plants and to broadly analyze the genome-wide transcriptional responses in order to demonstrate CAG as a new key molecule that can potentially help plants to overcome different environmental stresses. RNA-seq strategy was employed to assess the transcriptional profiles in A. thaliana calli. Our work primarily focused on an overall study on the transcriptomic responses of A. thaliana to CAG. A total of 22593 unigenes have been detected, among which 1045 unigenes associated with 213 GO terms were differentially expressed and were assigned to 118 KEGG pathways. The up-regulated genes are principally involved in cellular and metabolic processes in addition to the response to a stimulus. The data analysis revealed genes associated with defense signaling pathways such as cytochrome P450s transporter, antioxidant system genes, and stress-responsive protein families were significantly upregulated. The obtained results can potentially help in better understanding biotic and/or abiotic tolerance mechanisms in response to CAG.
Highlights
Extracted from Astragalus roots, a plant common to be used in Chinese traditional medicine, Cycloastragenol (CAG, molecular weight: 490,72 g/mol) is known to play a significant role in telomerase activation in Eukaryotic cells which is tightly linked to genome stability and involved in the prevention of some human diseases
To broadly analyze the molecular and the physiological mechanisms and the genome-wide transcriptional responses caused by Cycloastragenol, we sequenced two cDNA libraries developed from A. thaliana treated calli with 1μM and without CAG
The sequenced dataset generated in the present study has been deposited at the Gene Expression Omnibus (GEO) and the Sequence Read Archive (SRA) databases of National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) under the accession numbers, respectively, GSE158409 and SRP285089
Summary
Extracted from Astragalus roots, a plant common to be used in Chinese traditional medicine, Cycloastragenol (CAG, molecular weight: 490,72 g/mol) is known to play a significant role in telomerase activation in Eukaryotic cells which is tightly linked to genome stability and involved in the prevention of some human diseases. NGS is one of the most useful strategies investigating plant transcriptome in certain conditions; among NGS technologies, RNA-seq is the most powerful tool to compare transcriptome profiling It is a rapid, highly reproducible, and a low-priced whole-transcriptome analysis procedure enabling us to analyze transcriptomes and to understand the expression profile of the genome [5,6,7]. Transcriptional network and the main metabolic activities involved in CAG treatment consequences on plant growth and their behavior towards environmental stresses were determined based on a transcriptomic data analysis using bioinformatics tools. Our study provides a broadspectrum study of the A. thaliana transcriptomic response to Cycloastragenol and a clarification of the differentially expressed genes in Arabidopsis calli
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