De novo transcriptomic profiling of the clonal Leymus chinensis response to long-term overgrazing-induced memory

作者：Weibo Ren, Xiangyang Hou, Zinian Wu, Lingqi Kong, Huiqin Guo, Ning Hu, Dongli Wan, Jize Zhang · 发表于：Scientific Reports · 年份：2018 · DOI：10.1038/s41598-018-35605-y · 被引用次数：13 · 研究领域：Medicinal Plant Research、Moringa oleifera research and applications、Essential Oils and Antimicrobial Activity

Abstract Sheepgrass ( Leymus chinensis ) is one of the dominant grass species present on typical steppes of the Inner Mongolia Plateau. However, L . chinensis has developed a dwarfing phenotype in response to the stressful habitat in grasslands that are severely degraded due to heavy grazing. The lack of transcriptomic and genomic information has prohibited the understanding of the transgenerational effect on physiological alterations in clonal L . chinensis at the molecular level in response to livestock grazing. To solve this problem, transcriptomic information from the leaves of clonal L . chinensis obtained from overgrazed (GR) and non-grazed (NG) grasslands was studied using a paired-end Illumina HiSeq 2500 sequencing platform. First, despite the influence of grazing being absent during the growth of clonal offspring in our hydroponic experiment, compared with those from the NG group, clonal L . chinensis from the GR group exhibited significant dwarf-type morphological traits. A total of 116,356 unigenes were subsequently generated and assembled de novo , of which 55,541 could be annotated to homologous matches in the NCBI non-redundant (Nr), Swiss-Prot, Clusters of Orthologous Groups (COG), gene ontology (GO), or Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) databases. The expression of 3,341 unigenes significantly differed between the GR group and the NG group with an absolute value of Log 2 ratio ≥ 1. The altered expression of genes involved in defence and immune res...