Mining of disease-resistance genes in Crocus sativus based on transcriptome sequencing

Dongdong Ye¹ Siwei Zhang¹ Xiankui Gao¹ Xiujuan Li¹ Xin Jin² Min Shi^1* Guoyin Kai^1* Wei Zhou^1*

• ¹Zhejiang Provincial TCM Key Laboratory of Chinese Medicine Resource Innovation and Transformation, School of Pharmaceutical Sciences, Zhejiang Chinese Medical University, Hangzhou 310053, China, China
• ²State Key Laboratory of Subtropical Silviculture, Zhejiang A&F University, Lin’an, Hangzhou 311300, Zhejiang, China, China

Crocus sativus L. has an important medicinal and economic value in traditional perennial Chinese medicine. However, due to its unique growth characteristics, during cultivation it is highly susceptible to disease. The absence of effective resistance genes restricts us to breed new resistant varieties of C. sativus. In present study, comprehensive transcriptome sequencing was introduced to explore the disease resistance of the candidate gene in healthy and corm rot-infected C. sativus. Totally, 43.72 Gb of clean data was obtained from the assembly to generate 65,337 unigenes. By comparing the gene expression levels, 7,575 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were primarily screened. A majority of the DEGs were completely in charge of defense and metabolism, and 152 of them were annotated as pathogen recognition genes (PRGs) based on the PGRdb dataset. The expression of some transcription factors including NAC, MYB, and WRKY members, changed significantly based on the dataset of transcriptome sequencing. Therefore, this study provides us some valuable information for exploring candidate genes involved in the disease resistance in C. sativus.