Arachis hypogaea Transcriptome or Gene expression

Abiotic stresses comprise all non-living factors, such as soil salinity, drought, extreme temperatures, and metal toxicity, posing a serious threat to the agriculture and affecting the plant production around the world. Peanut (Arachis hypogaea L.) is one of the most economically important crops for vegetable oil, proteins, minerals and vitamins in the world. Therefore, it is of importance to understand the molecular tolerance mechanism of peanut against salt stress. Here, a high-through transcriptome sequencing of cultivated peanut variety under long-term salinity stress conditions was performed and was deeply analyzed. Six libraries were constructed from the young leaves of peanut seedlings growing within salinity stress conditions for 12 h and control samples at 0 h. A comprehensive analysis between two groups showed 3,425 differentially expressed genes (DEGs) on an extremely strict criteria setting with FDR = 0.01 and absolute log FC = 2, among which included 2,013 up-regulated genes and 1,412 down-regulated genes. Among of the DEGs, 141 transcription factors (TFs) were identified in response to salinity stress. TF families of MYB, AP2/ERF, WRKY, bHLH and HSF were included with relatively largest volumes representing 87.94 %. GO categories highly related to regulation of cell growth, cell periphery, sustain external encapsulating structure, cell wall organization or biogenesis, antioxidant activity, and peroxidase activity were significantly enriched for up-regulated DEGs. The function of down-regulated DEGs was mainly enriched in regulation of metabolic process, oxidoreductase activity and catalytic activity. Fourteen DEGs with response to salt tolerance, involved in plant hormone signaling, transcription factors, secondary metabolism and oxidative damage, were validated by quantitative real-time reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (qRT-PCR). The identification of differentially expressed salt tolerance genes in cultivated peanut will provide a solid foundation for improving salt-tolerant peanut genetic manipulation in the future.