Transcriptional response to drought stress in chickpea

In this study, we aim to present a global view of transcriptome dynamics during drought stress in different chickpea genotypes. We generated about 800 million high-quality reads from 14 libraries (control and stress samples for two chickpea genotypes for drought stress at two developmental stages) using Illumina high-throughput sequencing platform. We mapped the reads to the kabuli chickpea genome for estimation of their transcript abundance in different tissue samples. The transcriptome dynamics was studied by differential gene expression analyses between stress treatment and control sample for each genotype. Overall design: We collected roots of chickpea genotypes from vegetative and reproductive stage plants subjected to control (water) and drought (water withhelding till transpiration ratio reached 0.2) stress. Total RNA isolated from these tissue samples was subjected to Illumina sequencing. The sequenced data was further filtered using NGS QC Toolkit to obtain high-quality reads. The filtered reads were mapped to annotated chickpea genome using TopHat and fragments per exon kilobase per million (FPKM) was calculated using Cufflinks software for each gene in all the sample to measure their gene expression. Differential expression analysis was performed using Cuffdiff software. The differentially expressed genes during various stress conditions were identified.