Revealing impaired pathways in regulatory mutants by high-throughput characterization of Petunia axillaris and inflata transcriptomes

The petunia flower has served as a model system for the investigation of anthocyanin biosynthesis, floral development and self-incompatibility. Even if petunia has been used as a model plant to enrich our knowledge on several physiological processes, the magnitude of unexplored sequence space is still large. Here, we report the use of RNA-Seq to characterize the transcriptome of both Petunia inflata (violet flower petunia) and Petunia axillaris (large white petunia) and to develop affordable tools for functional genomics. RNA samples from five different plant organs were extracted, pooled and used to generate normalized cDNA libraries. Then, 3’ cDNA fragments were sequenced using the Roche GS-FLX platform. The 454 reads were pre-processed, clustered, assembled and annotated in order to obtain a catalogue of unique transcripts for each species.