Identification of cadmium resistance and transcriptome sequence analysis under Cadmium Stress in Verbena bonariensis

Verbena bonariensis is a species with excellent garden plant, good environmental adaptability and great potential for future development.Cadmium has caused serious heavy metal pollution in the soil, which has posed a great threat to plant growth. In this study, Illumina sequencing technology was used to sequence the transcriptome of Verbena bonariensis leaf under normal and Cd stress, respectively. In total, 95,013 transcripts and 63021 genes with an average length of 923 bp and 1,246 bp were constructed from the clean sequence reads, respectively. And 1037 DEGs were found in response to cadmium treatment, of which 10 were selected for qRT-PCR. In conclusion, this study first identified the Verbena bonariensis as a heavy metal tolerant plant and provided the first large-scale transcriptional data set in response to cadmium stress. Our research will help to understand the mechanism of resistance to Cd in the Verbena bonariensis and provide clues for further studies on the relationships between plants and heavy metals in other Verbenaceae plants. Overall design: transcriptome of two kinds of plant leaves which were treated under normal and cadmium treatment was sequenced by the Illumina sequencing technology