Background
Pinellia ternate (Thunb.) Breit. ( P. ternate ), a weed species distributed in Eastern Asia, has been widely used as a Chinese herbal medicine. Currently, four genotypes of P. ternate have been identified according to their different leaf shapes, including Shaoye, Taoye, Zhuye and Liuye Type. In addition, the total alkaloids and organic acids content in tuber, tuber yields and other physiology and agronomic characteristics were significant difference. However, little is known about the evolution and genetic diversity of four genotypes of P. ternate . Moreover, the genomics of P. ternate remains uncharacterized. The recent development of RNA-Seq, a next generation sequencing technology, provides an opportunity to expand the identification of P. ternate genes through in-depth transcript profiling.
Methods
In this study, we presented a comprehensive landscape of the transcriptome profiles of four genotypes of P. ternate using Illumina paired-end sequencing technology.
Results
Totally, 70,491,871, 72,819,035, 73,159,913 and 71,612,115 reads were achieved in four genotypes of P. ternate , respectively. A total number of 126,391 assembled unigenes were identified. After aligning the sequences to the public protein databases, 82,998 unigenes were annotated. Among these, 15,534 were assigned to Gene Ontology categories, 41,216 to Clusters of Orthologous Groups, and 46,053 to Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathways. In addition, 23,678 simple sequence repeats (SSRs) and 65,527 Single Nucleotide Polymorphism (SNP) variations were detected.
Conclusion
This study provides abundant genomic data and comprehensive transcriptome for P. ternate . We envision that these transcriptome datasets will serve as an important public information platform to accelerate further studies of the P. ternate and the identification of genes that potentially involving in the biosynthesis of total alkaloids, acid and other active ingredients among different genotypes P. ternate .