Transcriptome analysis on overwater stress treated Panax ginseng

Panax ginseng is one of the most valuable medicinal plants grown in Korea. Floods in rainy season cause serious stress for ginseng which lead to necrotic response especially in the root tissue. Thus, understanding the necrotic process is one of the key measures to overcome the economic damage caused by floods in ginseng industry. Flood cause necrotic response with very short time in ginseng, thus study on over-watered ginseng plant was merely analyzed so far. To identify genome-wide transcriptome changes in response to flood stress in time-course, we identified ambient water stress condition which caused no obvious physiological sign of necrosis yet with transcriptomic changes. In this condition, we performed transcriptome analysis to identify which genes are responding to flood stress. Our condition comprised of only covering the root with 100 % of humidity which was not studied in transcriptome analysis even in Arabiodpsis, we were to identify flood-specific response by comparative transcriptome analysis with submergence treated Arabidopsis data. In comparison of GO analysis, we could identify our condition introduce flood-specific responses including anatomical structure rearrangement or phosphate transport yet with common response with submergence transcriptome such as abscisic acid activated signaling pathway. Our study provided strong marker genes even in response to ambient water stress, which provides valuable hint to control / overcome the flooding stress condition in ginseng cultivation.