Introduction
Aquifoliaceae, also known as the holly family, comprising the single species-rich genus Ilex L. and more than 600 species (). Species in this family are dioecious shrubs or trees. It is sub-cosmopolitan, but is best represented in mountainous areas of the tropics, especially in Asia, Central and South America. Many holly species possess great economic value and folk cultural significance. Some of them are commonly used as ornamental plants in parks and gardens for their foliage and decorative berries, such as the common holly I. aquifolium, the American holly I. opaca, the horned holly I. cornuta, and the Japanese holly I. crenata. The fruiting branches are also popularly applied to decorate temple courts in China and Christmas trees in the West. Some hollies can also be made into beverages, including I. paraguariensis (the “Yerba Mate” or Paraguay Tea in South America), I. vomitoria (the “Cassena” or Black Drink in North America and Mexico), I. latifolia (Kudingcha in East Asia).
In recent years, genome sequencing has become an important step to decipher the genetic structure and to understand the biological principles controlling the various traits of these plants (; ; ). In order to better store, inquire, mine, integrate, and disseminate the abundant datasets, more and more special comprehensive databases have been launched during the past several years (; ; ). As a group with important economic value, the genomic and genetic data have been rapidly accumulated for hollies (; ; ). However, there is still no integrative database for comparative genomics and transcriptomics of hollies to study gene function and genome evolution. The research community for holly has gathered a significant amount of taxonomic information over the last few decades, including type locality, type specimens, and herbarium code (; ; ). But the lack of a standardized platform for data processing and visualization limits the accessibility of such data.
Herein, we developed the Holly Genome and Taxonomy Database (HollyGTD) (https://hollygdb.com/), which integrates the holly data from public databases with the data produced by our group. The HollyGTD combines a variety of multi-omics data (genome, re-sequencing, and transcriptome) and taxonomic resources with a wealth of phenotypic images. HollyGTD offers a couple of easy-to-use access functions/interfaces and eight built-in tools for data analysis, for instance, Blast, JBrowse, Search Gene, Tissue Expression, Gene Annotation, Phylogenetic Tree, Primer Design, and Literature. Therefore, we believe that HollyGTD, a comprehensive database with useful data on genome, genotype, and taxonomy, may represent a valuable resource for the entire holly research community.
Materials and methods
Hardware and software
On a Linux server powered by Alibaba Cloud technology, the HollyGTD website is hosted. Technical assistance and web application development have both used the PHP language. The back-end servers were developed by MySQL. HollyGTD’s website interfaces were created using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. To produce interactive data visualizations, Highcharts (https://www.highcharts.com) was integrated with histograms and heatmaps.
Resources of genome references and annotations
Two chromosome level genomes in HollyGTD, Ilex asprella and I. polyneura, were retrieved from NGDC () and NCBI (), respectively. The assembly and annotation of the Ilex latifolia genome were done by our group. Genome resources were available in Supplementary Table S1.
Genotyping of re-sequencing data
The raw re-sequencing data of 114 Ilex species were produced using Illumina Hiseq X Ten platform by our group (Supplementary Table S1). After removing the adapter using trim_galore v0.5.0 (http://www.bioinformatics.babraham.ac.uk/projects/trim_galore/), clean reads were mapped to the I. latifolia genome using bwa v0.7.17 (). The variants were then invoked using the standard GATK v4.1.2.0 pipeline (). SNPs and allele frequency (more than 0.05) were further analyzed. SnpEff v5.1 () was performed to identify SNPs in exons, introns, intergenic regions, 5’ UTRs and 3’ UTRs according the GFF3 file of I. latifolia.
Gene annotation via InterProScan
Using InterProScan (5.30), functional domains of protein-coding genes were discovered (). A detailed page with information on homologous, families, domains, repeats, and GO terms was assigned to each gene.
Taxonomy and phylogenetic tree
Nomenclature of 808 scientific names of Aquifoliaceae were retrieved from Tropicos (https://www.tropicos.org/home) and Jstor (https://www.jstor.org/). Photos of leaves, flowers, pollens, whole plants, and so on were collected from our group. The phylogenetic tree was obtained from Yang’s research ().
Literature collection
Using the Python Entrez library, automated searches for the terms “Ilex AND Aquifoliaceae” were created. Then, 709 holly-related literatures were kept after manual filtration.
Content of HollyGTD
HollyGTD is made up of three parts: modules, data, and tools (Figure 1). These three parts work together to better organize all of the current data stored in bulk on HollyGTD and to provide users with user-friendly interfaces and easy-to-use tools.
Figure 1
HollyGTD harbors three major modules or interfaces to present the genome, genotype, and taxonomy datasets (Figure 1). Through these modules, users can easily access the underlying data. 1) Genome, which offers comprehensive details on three reference genomes and associated annotations; 2) Genotype, which provides variations produced from re-sequencing data of 114 species via visual and searchable access ports; 3) Taxonomy, which houses taxonomic data on every Aquifoliaceae species and arranges all of the manually collected phenotypic images by our group.
Data in HollyGTD include three genomes and associated annotations, 114 re-sequencing data from distinct species of holly, 21 RNA-Seq datasets with different developmental stages, taxonomic information of 808 scientific names, more than 700 research papers published in the last decades, and batched phenotypic photos.
The third part of HollyGTD is designed to create and integrate eight related tools with various functions or data in order to make it easier for users to use and download these data (Figure 1). Blast, JBrowse, Primer Design, Search Gene, and Gene Annotation are tools related to various genomics data. Tissue Expression tool interactively displays transcriptomic datasets among distinct developmental stages of fruits and leaves. Phylogenetic Tree enables users to search against the most recent taxonomic relationship of Aquifoliaceae according to Yang’s study (). Literature is used to fast retrieval and access published researches on holly. In addition to these tools, browsers, search engines, filters, and other tools are available to make HollyGTD use easier.
Tools of HollyGTD
Blast
Blast allows users to search the homologous sequences of interest against three holly genomes (Figure 2A), either through filling a sequence in the text box or uploading a fasta file. Users can customize their query with advanced options and choose one of the five Blast options (blastn, blastp, blastx, tblastn, or tblastx) that are available. The output results of Blast hits are shown as collapsible fields in a standard table with the following columns: Query name, Target name, Score, Identities, Percentage, and Expect.
Figure 2
JBrowse
JBrowse is an open-source, extensible and comprehensive computational platform used to visualize and integrate genomic and multi-omics data (). The integrated data of three genomes and annotated genomic datasets are displayed in HollyGTD using JBrowse2 (Figure 2B). HollyGTD currently provides three genome data, and users can easily browse and explore the information they need or are interested in, like the level of expression of particular genes.
Search gene
Users can search all annotated holly genes using the Search Gene tool, download the genomics, CDS, and protein of a particular gene, and view the gene structure and sequence using a graphic panel. This tool was developed to make it easier for users to use and download each gene’s information (Figure 2C).
Tissue expression
Using I. latifolia as the reference genome, RNA-Seq datasets were used to determine each gene’s expression level (Figure 2D). The Tissue Expression tool can find out the expression level of a given gene in green fruits, red fruits, and different developmental stages of leaves. To visualize the expression data, Highcharts (https://www.highcharts.com) was performed to generate an interactive and dynamic histogram and heatmap. When the cursor is placed over a point on the heatmap, the gene ID, SRR ID, FPKM, and other pertinent data are displayed.
Primer design
A web-based PCR primer design tool, Primer-Design, is created with primer3 () as the core program to facilitate the users’ molecular experiment (Figure 2E). In addition to the standard primer design function, some novel features for genetic experiment design are available. For instance, by entering the gene ID, the genomic sequences can be automatically loaded into the input field. Additionally, users have a variety of parameters for primer design.
Gene annotation
Gene Annotation tool gathers additional functional annotations for each gene, such as detailed information on a specific gene family, homologous superfamily, domains, repeats and GO (Gene Ontology) terms obtained through the InterPro database () (Figure 2F).
Phylogenetic tree
Based on the newly generated phylogenetic tree using rigorously identified 202 species and closely authenticated gene sequences of three nuclear genes (ITS, ETS, and nepGS), Phylogenetic Tree tool serves users with a convenient web search to retrieve the systematic status of the queried species (Figure 2G).
Literature
HollyGTD offers a specialized literature retrieval tool for holly scientific research, consisting of more than 700 papers published in the past few decades, to facilitate efficient literature triage and curation (Figure 2H). The literature search tool supports keyword searches for years, authors, titles, and journals, while the hyperlinks to full-texts publications are provided in the list of research result.
Statements
Data availability statement
The sources of omics data in HollyGTD are available at Supplementary Table S1. The original contributions presented in the study are publicly available. This data can be found here: https://ngdc.cncb.ac.cn/gwh, GWHBIST00000000.
Author contributions
K-WX, XY and ZG designed the project. ZG and JW designed and developed the HollyGTD website. JW and DW improved the web interface. CL and YP collected and collated the data. ZG and JW performed the bioinformatic analyses. K-WX, ZG and JW wrote the manuscript. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.
Funding
This work was supported by the Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province (#BK20210612), the National Natural Science Foundation of China (#32100167), the Nanjing Forestry University project funding (#163108093) and Beijing Academy of Agriculture and Forestry Sciences (#JKZX2022201).
Conflict of interest
Author DW was employed by company WeiRan Biotech.
The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Publisher’s note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.
Supplementary material
The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpls.2023.1220925/full#supplementary-material
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Summary
Keywords
holly, Aquifoliaceae, genome, taxonomy, database
Citation
Guo Z, Wei J, Xu Z, Lin C, Peng Y, Wang Q, Wang D, Yang X and Xu K-W (2023) HollyGTD: an integrated database for holly (Aquifoliaceae) genome and taxonomy. Front. Plant Sci. 14:1220925. doi: 10.3389/fpls.2023.1220925
Received
11 May 2023
Accepted
16 June 2023
Published
04 July 2023
Volume
14 - 2023
Edited by
Mark Chapman, University of Southampton, United Kingdom
Reviewed by
Daniel B. Marchant, Stanford University, United States; Xiao Chun Wan, Anhui Agricultural University, China; Hong Chen, Jiangsu Province and Chinese Academy of Sciences, China
Updates
Copyright
© 2023 Guo, Wei, Xu, Lin, Peng, Wang, Wang, Yang and Xu.
This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
*Correspondence: Ke-Wang Xu, xukw10@njfu.edu.cn; Xiaozeng Yang, yangxz@sRNAworld.com
†These authors have contributed equally to this work and share first authorship
Disclaimer
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.