Integration of physiological and transcriptomic analyses to investigate the response mechanism of NaHCO3 stress tolerance in Hosta

The Hosta is an excellent groundcover plant with great ornamental value and exceptional stress tolerance; nevertheless, no studies have been conducted to investigate the mechanism of alkali tolerance or to mine alkali tolerance genes in Hosta. The goal of this work was to discover potential genes that respond to salt and alkali stress by conducting a comparative transcriptome analysis on Hosta species (H. 'Indigo Leaf') that has been exposed to such stress conditions. The variety was treated with 200 mM NaHCO3 solution, and eight physiological parameters, including malondialdehyde (MDA), superoxide dismutase (SOD), peroxidase (POD), proline (PRO), catalase (CAT), soluble proteins, relative conductivity, and soluble sugar activity, were measured. Based on the physiological analysis results, two time points with the strongest alkali-resistant responses (6 h and 12 h) and one time point with the weakest response (48 h) were chosen and combined with the control group (0 h) to form a total of four time points for RNA-seq analysis. De novo assembly revealed 231,332 unigenes in the leaves of H. 'Indigo Leaf'. 2,366 genes were expressed differently in three comparison groups: A6 vs. C, A12 vs. C, and A48 vs. C.