De novo transcriptome analysis of Tibetan medicinal plant Dysphania schraderiana

Abstract Dysphania schraderiana is widely distributed in Lhasa (Tibet, China) and used as a traditional medicine. However, the lack of genetic information hinders the understanding of its physiological processes, such as the biosynthesis of secondary metabolites. Herein, we used Illumina Hiseq4000 platform to sequence the transcriptome of flower and leaf tissues from D. schraderiana for the first time. Totally, 40,142 unigenes were assembled from approximately 5.2 million clean reads. All unigenes underwent gene prediction and were subsequently annotated in a NR (NCBI non-redundant protein) database, COG (Clusters of Orthologous Groups of proteins) database, and KEGG (Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes) database. Among the 40,142 unigenes, 2,579 genes were identified as differentially expressed between flowers and leaves, and used in further enrichment analysis. Also, 2,156 unigenes were annotated as transcription factors. Furthermore, our transcriptome analysis resulted in the identification of candidate unigenes annotated to enzymes involved in terpenoid biosynthesis. Taken together, this work has laid the foundation for the investigation of secondary metabolite biosynthesis and other physiological processes of D. schraderiana.