The temporal foliar transcriptome of the perennial C3 desert plant Rhazya stricta in its natural environment

BMC Plant Biology

Research Article

Nabih Baeshen¹  Mohammad Z Mutwakil¹  Mohammed Baeshen¹  Jamal Sabir¹  Steven A Yates²  Philip M Mullineaux²  Ulrike Bechtold²  Tracy Lawson²  Igor Chernukhin²  Ruben Alvarez-Fernandez² 

[1] Department of Biological Sciences, Faculty of Science, King Abdulaziz University, 80203, 21589, Jeddah, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia;School of Biological Sciences, University of Essex, CO4 3SQ, Colchester, UK;

关键词: Next generation sequencing;    Transcriptomics;    Circadian clock;    Rhazya stricta;    Perennial desert plants;    Heat stress;    Salinity stress;    C photosynthesis;   

DOI  :  10.1186/1471-2229-14-2

 received in 2013-09-17, accepted in 2013-12-23,  发布年份 2014

来源: Springer

【 摘 要 】

BackgroundThe perennial species Rhazya stricta (R. stricta) grows in arid zones and carries out typical C3 photosynthesis under daily extremes of heat, light intensity and low humidity. In order to identify processes attributable to its adaptation to this harsh environment, we profiled the foliar transcriptome of apical and mature leaves harvested from the field at three time periods of the same day.ResultsNext generation sequencing was used to reconstruct the transcriptome and quantify gene expression. 28018 full length transcript sequences were recovered and 45.4% were differentially expressed (DE) throughout the day. We compared our dataset with microarray experiments in Arabidopsis thaliana (Arabidopsis) and other desert species to identify trends in circadian and stress response profiles between species. 34% of the DE genes were homologous to Arabidopsis circadian-regulated genes. Independent of circadian control, significant overlaps with Arabidopsis genes were observed only with heat and salinity/high light stress-responsive genes. Also, groups of DE genes common to other desert plants species were identified. We identified protein families specific to R. stricta which were found to have diverged from their homologs in other species and which were over -expressed at midday.ConclusionsThis study shows that temporal profiling is essential to assess the significance of genes apparently responsive to abiotic stress. This revealed that in R. stricta, the circadian clock is a major regulator of DE genes, even of those annotated as stress-responsive in other species. This may be an important feature of the adaptation of R. stricta to its extreme but predictable environment. However, the majority of DE genes were not circadian-regulated. Of these, some were common to other desert species and others were distinct to R. stricta, suggesting that they are important for the adaptation of such plants to arid environments.

【 授权许可】

Unknown   
© Yates et al.; licensee BioMed Central Ltd. 2014. This article is published under license to BioMed Central Ltd. This is an Open Access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. 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.