Saffron Transcriptome and Gene Expression. Crocus sativus

In this study, we aim to present a global transcriptome analysis of medicinal/spice plant, Crocus sativus. We generated about 206 million high-quality reads from five tissues (corm, leaf, Tepal, stamen and stigma) using Illumina platform. We performed an optimized de novo assembly of the reads and estimated transcript abundance in different tissue samples. The transcriptome dynamics was studied by differential gene expression analyses among tissue samples. Overall design: We collected different tissue samples from the mature plants. Total RNA isolated from these tissue samples was subjected to Illumina sequencing. The sequence data was further filtered using NGS QC Toolkit to obtain high-quality reads. The filtered reads were used for de novo assembly optimization. The reads were further mapped to the saffron transcripts via CLC Genomics Workbench and differential gene expression analysis was performed using DESeq software.

本研究旨在开展药用/香料植物藏红花（Crocus sativus）的全局转录组分析。本研究采用Illumina测序平台，对球茎、叶片、花被片、雄蕊和柱头共5种组织进行测序，获得约2.06亿条高质量读段。我们对所得读段开展优化的从头组装，并估算了不同组织样本的转录本丰度。通过不同组织间的差异基因表达分析，揭示转录组的动态变化特征。实验整体设计如下：我们从成熟植株中采集了多种组织样本；从这些组织中分离得到的总RNA经Illumina测序获得原始序列数据；随后使用NGS QC Toolkit对测序数据进行质量过滤，以获取高质量读段；将过滤后的读段用于优化从头组装流程；通过CLC基因组工作台（CLC Genomics Workbench）将读段比对至藏红花转录本，并借助DESeq软件完成差异基因表达分析。