Calotropis procera is a medicinal plant of immense importance due to its pharmaceutical active components, especially cardiac glycosides (CG). As genomic resources for this plant are limited, the genes involved in CG biosynthetic pathway remain largely unknown till date. Our study on stage and tissue specific metabolite accumulation showed that CG’s were maximally accumulated in stems of 3 month old seedlings. De novo transcriptome sequencing of same was done using high throughput Illumina HiSeq platform generating 44074 unigenes with average mean length of 1785 base pair. Around 66.6% of unigenes were annotated by using various public databases and 5324 unigenes showed significant match in the KEGG database involved in 133 different pathways of plant metabolism. Further KEGG analysis resulted in identification of 336 unigenes involved in cardenolide biosynthesis. Tissue specific expression analysis of 30 putative transcripts involved in terpenoid, steroid and cardenolide pathways showed a positive correlation between metabolite and transcript accumulation. Wound stress elevated CG levels as well the levels of the putative transcripts involved in its biosynthetic pathways. This result further validated the involvement of identified transcripts in CGs biosynthesis. The identified transcripts will lay a substantial foundation for further research on metabolic engineering and regulation of cardiac glycosides biosynthesis pathway genes.

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This study investigates the contribution of electronic word-of-mouth (eWOM) to the sales of music albums. We conducted an empirical investigation of twenty-two music albums for a period of eleven consecutive weeks. eWOM was identified as an uncertainty-reducing element in consumer decision-making. Generally, the research hypotheses were partially supported using a multivariate linear regression model. We also found a stronger correlation between some eWOM channels and sales compared to other channels. eWOM has traditionally been considered an unstructured and ad-hoc source of sentiment. Our results suggest that eWOM generated in social networking when analysed appropriately is a fairly reliable predictor of market success. It is effective as a tacit suggestion, recommendation, or referral element with viral network effects. The intended contribution of this work is in identifying eWOM as a significant information contributor in the digital marketplace.

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