Jatropha curcas L. gene expression under cold stress

Jatropha curcas L., as an important renewable bioenergy plant, has gradually attracted increased interest for biodiesel, due to its high oil content in seed and grown on non-agricultural lands. Cold stress, main limiting factor, impairs the cultivation and distribution of J.curcas. In this study, a powerful deep high-throughput sequencing approach named Illumina Hiseq™ 2000 RNA-seq was exploited for transcriptome sequencing analysis of J. curcas from a mixed sampling of the untreated and cold-treated seedlings. The results allowed us to decipher the key genes related to the biosynthesis of oils and secondary metabolites especially of the diterpenes such as phorbol esters, as well as those coding for cold tolerance in this sequence library.