Abstract
Background: Consuming watercress is thought to provide health benefits as a consequence of its phytonutrient composition. However, for watercress there are currently limited genetic resources underpinning breeding efforts for either yield or phytonutritional traits. In this paper, we use RNASeq data from twelve watercress accessions to characterize the transcriptome, perform candidate gene mining and conduct differential expression analysis for two key phytonutritional traits: antioxidant (AO) capacity and glucosinolate (GLS) content.
Results: The watercress transcriptome was assembled to 80,800 transcripts (48,732 unigenes); 71 % of which were annotated based on orthology to Arabidopsis. Differential expression analysis comparing watercress accessions with 'high' and 'low' AO and GLS resulted in 145 and 94 differentially expressed loci for AO capacity and GLS respectively. Differentially expressed loci between high and low AO watercress were significantly enriched for genes involved in plant defence and response to stimuli, in line with the observation that AO are involved in plant stress-response. Differential expression between the high and low GLS watercress identified links to GLS regulation and also novel transcripts warranting further investigation. Additionally, we successfully identified watercress orthologs for Arabidopsis phenylpropanoid, GLS and shikimate biosynthesis pathway genes, and compiled a catalogue of polymorphic markers for future applications.
Conclusions: Our work describes the first transcriptome of watercress and establishes the foundation for further molecular study by providing valuable resources, including sequence data, annotated transcripts, candidate genes and markers.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 378 |
| Pages (from-to) | 1-15 |
| Number of pages | 15 |
| Journal | BMC Genomics |
| Volume | 17 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 20 May 2016 |
Keywords
- Watercress
- Nasturtium officinale
- Bassicaceae
- RNASeq
- de novo assembly
- Differential expression
- Antioxidant capacity
- Glucosinolates
- Gluconasturtiin
- Phenylpropanoid pathway
Access to Document
- Final Published Version
© 2016 Voutsina et al. Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.