Scutellaria baicalensis Transcriptome or Gene expression. Scutellaria baicalensis

Scutellariae baicalensis has long been used in clinical China medicine because of its bioactive constituents. Although physiological studies for these components have been conducted, the molecular mechanism of their biosynthesis remains unclear in S. baicalensis. In this study, we investigated transcriptome profiling to restructure the comprehensive characterization of gene expression patterns using an RNA-seq approach with Illumina/Solexa deep sequencing technologies. Here, we obtained more than 91 million paired-end reads and generated 69,416 transcripts that belonged to 24,702 unigenes. Approximately 65% of the total assembled transcripts had lengths of more than 1 kb, which demonstrated the high quality of the RNA-seq assembly. Furthermore, comprehensive transcriptome profiles of four differential tissues revealed the expression of at least 59,637 transcripts with reads per kilobase of transcripts model per million mapped reads of more than 3 in at least one of the tissues. Flavonoids isolated from the roots of S. baicalensis are the major component used in the treatment of disease. In this study, several important enzymes involved in the pathways of flavonoid biosynthesis were identified. Finally, our results demonstrated that differentially expressed genes were associated with the biosynthesis of baicalin and baicalein, which are two major and active flavonoids that compose most of the dry material of S. baicalensis. All of these results provided a useful resource for further analysis of gene functions in S. baicalensis.