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Morphological and stage-specific transcriptome analyses reveal distinct regulatory programs underlying yam (Dioscorea alata L.) bulbil growth.

ABSTRACT: In yam (Dioscorea spp) species, bulbils at leaf axils are the most striking species-specific axillary structure and exhibit important ecological niches. Genetic regulation underlying bulbil growth remains largely unclear so far. Here, we characterize yam (Dioscorea alata L.) bulbil development using histological analysis, and perform full transcriptional profiling on key developmental stages together with phytohormone analyses. Using the stage-specific scoring algorithm, we have identified 3451 stage-specifically expressed genes that exhibit a tight link between major transcriptional changes and stages. Co-expressed gene clusters revealed an obvious over-representation of genes associated with cell division and expansion at the initiation stage of bulbils (T1). Transcriptional changes of hormone-related genes highly coincided with hormone levels, indicating that bulbil initiation and growth are coordinately controlled by multiple phytohormones. In particular, localized auxin is transiently required to trigger bulbil initiation, and be further depleted or exported from bulbils to promote growth by up-regulation of genes involved in auxinconjugation and efflux. The sharp increase in supply of sucrose and an enhanced trehalose-6-phophate pathway at T1 were observed, suggesting that sucrose probably functions as a key signal and promotes bulbil initiation. Analysis of the expression of transcription factors (TFs) predicated 149 TFs as stage-specifically expressed; several T1-specific TFs (from Aux/IAA, E2F, MYB, and bHLH families) have been shown to play key roles in triggering bulbil formation. Together, our work provides a crucial angle for in-depth understanding of the molecular programs underlying yam's unique bulbil development processes. Stage-specific gene sets can be queried to obtain key candidates regulating bulbil growth, serving as valuable resources for further functional research.

SUBMITTER: Wu ZG

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7242083 | biostudies-literature | 2020 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

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Project description:The reducing cost and rapid progress in next-generation sequencing techniques coupled with high performance computational approaches have resulted in large-scale discovery of advanced genomic resources in several model and non-model plant species. Yam (Dioscorea spp.) is a major food and cash crop in many countries but research efforts have been limited to understand the genetics and generate genomic information for the crop. The availability of a large number of genomic resources including genome-wide molecular markers will accelerate the breeding efforts and application of genomic selection in yams. In the present study, several methods including expressed sequence tags (EST)-sequencing, de novo sequencing, and genotyping-by-sequencing (GBS) profiles on two yam (Dioscorea alata L.) genotypes (TDa 95/00328 and TDa 95-310) was performed to generate genomic resources for use in its improvement programs. This includes a comprehensive set of EST-SSRs, genomic SSRs, whole genome SNPs, and reduced representation SNPs. A total of 1,152 EST-SSRs were developed from >40,000 EST-sequences generated from the two genotypes. A set of 388 EST-SSRs were validated as polymorphic showing a polymorphism rate of 34% when tested on two diverse parents targeted for anthracnose disease. In addition, approximately 40X de novo whole genome sequence coverage was generated for each of the two genotypes, and a total of 18,584 and 15,952 genomic SSRs were identified for TDa 95/00328 and TDa 95-310, respectively. A custom made pipeline resulted in the selection of 573 genomic SSRs common across the two genotypes, of which only eight failed, 478 being polymorphic and 62 monomorphic indicating a polymorphic rate of 83.5%. Additionally, 288,505 high quality SNPs were also identified between these two genotypes. Genotyping by sequencing reads on these two genotypes also revealed 36,790 overlapping SNP positions that are distributed throughout the genome. Our efforts in using different approaches in generating genomic resources provides a non-biased glimpse into the publicly available EST-sequences, yam genome, and GBS profiles with affirmation that the genomic complexity can be methodically unraveled and constitute a critical foundation for future studies in linkage mapping, germplasm analysis, and predictive breeding.

Project description:BackgroundYam (Dioscorea alata L.) is an important tuber crop and purple pigmented elite cultivar has recently become popular because of associated health benefits. Identifying candidate genes responsible for flavonoid biosynthesis pathway (FBP) will facilitate understanding the molecular mechanism of controlling pigment formation in yam tubers. Here, we used Illumina sequencing to characterize the transcriptome of tubers from elite purple-flesh cultivar (DP) and conventional white-flesh cultivar (DW) of yam. In this process, we also designed high quality molecular markers to assist molecular breeding for tuber trait improvement.ResultsA total of 125,123 unigenes were identified from the DP and DW cDNA libraries, of which about 49.5% (60,020 unigenes) were annotated by BLASTX analysis using the publicly available protein database. These unigenes were further annotated functionally and subject to biochemical pathway analysis. 511 genes were identified to be more than 2-fold (FDR < 0.05) differentially expressed between the two yam cultivars, of which 288 genes were up-regulated and 223 genes were down-regulated in the DP tubers. Transcriptome analysis detected 61 unigenes encoding multiple well-known enzymes in the FBP. Furthermore, the unigenes encoding chalcone isomerase (CHS), flavanone 3-hydroxylase (F3H), flavonoid 3'-monooxygenase (F3'H), dihydroflavonol 4-reductase (DFR), leucoanthocyanidin dioxygenase (LDOX), and flavonol 3-O-glucosyltransferase (UF3GT) were found to be significantly up-regulated in the DP, implying that these genes were potentially associated with tuber color formation in this elite cultivar. The expression of these genes was further confirmed by qRT-PCR. Finally, 11,793 SSRs were successfully identified with these unigenes and 6,082 SSR markers were developed using Primer 3.ConclusionsThis study provides the first comprehensive transcriptomic dataset for yam tubers, which will significantly contribute to genomic research of this and other related species. Some key genes associated with purple-flesh trait were successfully identified, thus providing valuable information about molecular process of regulating pigment accumulation in elite yam tubers. In the future, this information might be directly used to genetically manipulate the conventional white-fleshed tuber cultivars to enable them to produce purple flesh. In addition, our SSR marker sets will facilitate identification of QTLs for various tuber traits in yam breeding programs.

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Morphological and stage-specific transcriptome analyses reveal distinct regulatory programs underlying yam (Dioscorea alata L.) bulbil growth.

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