Project description:Phytophthora cinnamomi Rands is a cosmopolite and phyllophagous pathogen of woody plants which during the last couple of centuries has spread all over the world from its center of origin in Southeast Asia. Despite Chinese cork tree (Quercus variabilis Blume) forests native to Asia being generally healthy, the populations of cork trees (Quercus suber L.) in Europe have been decimated by P. cinnamomi. The present study tries to identify the differences in the early proteomic and metabolomic response of these two tree species that lead to their contrasting susceptibility to P. cinnamomi attack. By using micropropagated clonal plants, we tried to minimize the plant-to-plant differences in the defense response that is maximized by the high intraspecific genetic variability inherent to the Quercus genus. The evolution on the content of Phytophthora proteins in the roots during the first 36 hours after inoculation suggest a slower infection process in Q. variabilis plants. These plants displayed a significant decrease in sugars in the roots, together with a downregulation of proteins related to carbon metabolism. In the leaves, the biggest changes in proteomic profiling were observed 16 hours after inoculation. and included increased abundance of peroxidases, superoxidedismutases and gluthatione S-transferases in Q. variabilis plants, which probably aided its resistance against P. cinnamomi attack.
Project description:Purpose: The goal of this study is to provided a comprehensive genomic information for functional genomic studies in Q. mongolica. Methods:The Quercus mongolica leaves were generated by deep sequencing, using Illumina Hiseq 4000. The high-quality reads were obtained by removing the reads that contained adaptor contamination, low quality bases and undetermined bases.The transcriptome were de novo assembly. Results:A total of 52934562 raw reads were obtained from Illumina sequencing platform. After filtering out the low quality reads, we obtained 52076914 clean reads, which assembled into 39130 transcripts with a mean length of 742 bp and GC content of 42.12%, and 24196 unigenes with a mean length of 732 bp and GC content of 42.34%, based on Trinity assembly platform. Conclusions:RNA-Seq was applied to polyadenylate-enriched mRNAs from leaves of Q. mongolica to obtain the transcriptome. De novo assembly was then applied followed by gene annotation and functional classification. The SSRs and SNPs were also obtained using assembled transcripts as reference sequences. The results of this study lay the foundation for further research on genetic diversity of Quercus.
