Salt stress RNA-seq of Jerusalem artichoke seedlings

Background: Jerusalem artichoke (Helianthus tuberosus L.) is moder-ately tolerant to salinity stress and has high economic value. The salt tolerance mechanisms of Jerusalem artichoke are still unclear. Espe-cially in the early stage of Jerusalem artichoke exposure to salt stress, gene transcription are likely to undergo large changes. Previous stud-ies have hinted at the importance of temporal expression analysis in plant transcriptome research. Elucidating these changes may be of great significance to understanding the salt tolerance mechanisms of it.Results: We obtained high-quality transcriptome from leaves and roots of Jerusalem artichoke exposed to salinity (300 mM NaCl) for 0 h, 6 h, 12 h, 24 h and 48 h, with 150,129 unigenes and 9023 DEGs (Differen-tially Expressed Genes). The RNA-seq data were clustered into time-dependent groups (nine clusters each in leaves and roots); gene functions were distributed evenly among them. KEGG enrichment analysis showed the genes related to plant hormone signal transduc-tion were enriched in almost all treatment comparisons. Under salt stress, genes belonging to PYL (abscisic acid receptor PYR / PYL fami-ly), PP2C (Type 2C protein phosphatases), GH3 (Gretchen Hagen3), ETR (ethylene receptor), EIN2/3 (ethylene-insensitive protein 2/3), JAZ (Genes such as jasmonate ZIM-domain gene) and MYC2 (Transcrip-tion factor MYC2) had extremely similar expression patterns. The re-sults of qPCR of 12 randomly selected and function known genes con-firmed the accuracy of RNA-seq.Conclusions: Under the influence of high salinity (300mM) environ-ment, Jerusalem artichoke suffer serious damage in a short period of time. Based on the expression of genes on the time scale, we found that the distribution of gene functions in time is relatively even. Upregula-tion of the phytohormone signal transduction had a crucial role in the response of Jerusalem artichoke seedlings to salt stress, the genes of abscisic acid, auxin, ethylene, and jasmonic acid had the most obvious change pattern. Research emphasized the regulatory role of hormones under high salt shocks and provided an explorable direction for the study of plant salt tolerance mechanisms.