BackgroundSugarcane is an important sugar and energy crop that is widely planted in the world. Among the environmental stresses, the water-deficit stress is the most limiting to plant productivity. Some groups have used PCR-based and microarray technologies to investigate the gene expression changes of multiple sugarcane cultivars under water stress. Our knowledge about sugarcane genes in response to water deficit is still poor.ResultsA wild sugarcane type, Saccharum narenga, was selected and treated with drought stress for 22 days. Leaves from drought treated (DTS) and control (CK) plants were obtained for deep sequencing. Paired-end sequencing enabled us to assemble 104,644 genes (N50 = 1605 bp), of which 38,721 were aligned to other databases, such as UniProt, NR, GO, KEGG and Pfam. Single-end and paired-end sequencing identified 30,297 genes (> 5 TPM) in all samples. Compared to CK, 3389 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were identified in DTS samples, comprising 1772 up-regulated and 1617 down-regulated genes. Functional analysis showed that the DEGs were involved in biological pathways like response to blue light, metabolic pathways and plant hormone signal transduction. We further observed the expression patterns of several important gene families, including aquaporins, late embryogenesis abundant proteins, auxin related proteins, transcription factors (TFs), heat shock proteins, light harvesting chlorophyll a-b binding proteins, disease resistance proteins, and ribosomal proteins. Interestingly, the regulation of genes varied among different subfamilies of aquaporin and ribosomal proteins. In addition, DIVARICATA and heat stress TFs were first reported in sugarcane leaves in response to water deficit. Further, we showed potential miRNAs that might be involved in the regulation of gene changes in sugarcane leaves under the water-deficit stress.ConclusionsThis is the first transcriptome study of Saccharum narenga and the assembled genes are a valuable resource for future research. Our findings will improve the understanding of the mechanism of gene regulation in sugarcane leaves under the water-deficit stress. The output of this study will also contribute to the sugarcane breeding program.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1186/s12870-018-1428-9) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Sucrose synthase (SuSy) is one of the key enzymes regulating sucrose metabolism in plants. There are at least five different SuSy genesexist in sugarcane, and their biological functions are not fully understood. In this paper, the phylogenetic analysis of all plantSuSygenes published to-date (109) has been grouped into three classes: SuSyI, SuSyII and SuSyIII. SuSyIwas further divided into monocot and eudicot SuSyI, indicating their independent evolutionary trajectory paralleling monocot and dicot divergence. The leaf total sugar content of high-, medium-and low-sugar sugarcane genotypes varied at the early stage of plant growth. However, there was no strong correlation between early-stage leaf sucrose content and the final stem sugar content and sugar yield of mature crop. The proportion of leaf sucrose and fructose content in most sugarcane genotypes in the early stage of growth was about 30%each, and that of glucose was about 40%. The SuSy enzyme activity and gene expression of sugarcane sucrose synthase gene ScSuSy1and ScSuSy4in those genotypes also showed a remarkable variation during the same growth period. The expression profiles of these genes in high-sugar, medium-and low-sugar genotypes were complex with no clear association between their activity at the early stage of plant growth and final sugar yield of those genotypes. The biological role of ScSuSy1and ScSuSy4gene may change with sugarcane plant development, and may be involved in both the synthesis and decomposition of sucrose.© 2021 Friends Science Publishers