Saffron Transcriptome and Gene Expression

In this study, we aim to present a global transcriptome analysis of medicinal/spice plant, Crocus sativus. We generated about 206 million high-quality reads from five tissues (corm, leaf, Tepal, stamen and stigma) using Illumina platform. We performed an optimized de novo assembly of the reads and estimated transcript abundance in different tissue samples. The transcriptome dynamics was studied by differential gene expression analyses among tissue samples. Overall design: We collected different tissue samples from the mature plants. Total RNA isolated from these tissue samples was subjected to Illumina sequencing. The sequence data was further filtered using NGS QC Toolkit to obtain high-quality reads. The filtered reads were used for de novo assembly optimization. The reads were further mapped to the saffron transcripts via CLC Genomics Workbench and differential gene expression analysis was performed using DESeq software.