Transcriptomics analysis of Paeonia lactiflora Pall. in response to drought stress by high-throughput sequencing

ABSTRACT

Drought is an environmental stress that limits agricultural and horticultural production worldwide. Paeonia lactiflora Pall. is a perennial flowering plant with strong environmental adaptability and a good candidate for production in arid areas. Using the Illumina Hiseq platform to study the transcriptome of P. lactiflora leaves under drought stress, 62.27 Gb of clean data was obtained and 87,099 unigenes (N50 = 1,352 bp; mean length = 790.66 bp) were obtained by transcriptome sequencing. After screening 4,198 differentially expressed genes, genes that may be related to the response of P. lactiflora to drought stress were identified: 28 signal transduction genes, 12 protein kinase genes, 14 transcription factor genes, 35 osmotic adjustment genes, 14 antioxidase enzyme genes, 22 photosynthesis genes, 9 AQP genes, 20 HSP genes, and 17 LEA genes. Transcriptomics analysis revealed that transcription factors, such as ERF, WRKY, and NAC transcription factor family members regulate the synthesis of hormones that play a role in signal transduction pathways of peony in response to drought stress. These results enrich currently available herbaceous peony gene sequence resources, fortify the identification of candidate genes and molecular regulatory mechanisms in response to drought stress, allowing genetic engineering to be used to create drought-tolerant plants.

KEYWORDS:

• Drought
• herbaceous peony
• qRT-PCR
• transcription factors
• transcriptome

Data availability

The sequence raw data from this study have been submitted to the NCBI Sequence Read Archive (PRJNA573496).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed here.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Forestry Science and Technology Development Project from State Forestry and Grassland Administration [under Grant # KJZXZZ2019001], the National Natural Science Foundation of China, [under Grant # 32071817]; and the World-Class Discipline Construction and Characteristic Development Guidance Funds for Beijing Forestry University [under Grant # 2019XKJS0322].