Transcriptional profiling of contrasting genotypes revealed key candidates and nucleotide variations for drought dissection in Camellia sinensis (L.) O. Kuntze

• Published in: Scientific reports Vol. 9; no. 1; p. 7487
• Main Authors: Parmar, Rajni, Seth, Romit, Singh, Pradeep, Singh, Gopal, Kumar, Sanjay, Sharma, Ram Kumar
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 16-05-2019; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: 38/39; 38/91; 45; 45/91; 631/337/2019; 631/449/2661/2146; Antioxidants; ATP-Binding Cassette Transporters - genetics; ATP-Binding Cassette Transporters - metabolism; Camellia sinensis - genetics; Camellia sinensis - metabolism; Drought; Drought resistance; Droughts; Gene expression; Genetic engineering; Genotype; Genotypes; Genotyping; Humanities and Social Sciences; multidisciplinary; Oxidative stress; Plant Proteins - genetics; Plant Proteins - metabolism; Polymorphism, Single Nucleotide; Quantitative Trait Loci; Science; Science (multidisciplinary); Single-nucleotide polymorphism; Stress, Physiological; Tea; Transcription; Transcriptome; Ubiquitin-Protein Ligases - genetics; Ubiquitin-Protein Ligases - metabolism
• ISSN: 2045-2322; 2045-2322
• DOI: 10.1038/s41598-019-43925-w

Tea is popular health beverage consumed by millions of people worldwide. Drought is among the acute abiotic stress severely affecting tea cultivation, globally. In current study, transcriptome sequencing of four diverse tea genotypes with inherent contrasting genetic response to drought (tolerant & sensitive) generated more than 140 million reads.
De novo
and reference-based assembly and functional annotation of 67,093 transcripts with multifarious public protein databases yielded 54,484 (78.2%) transcripts with significant enrichment of GO and KEGG drought responsive pathways in tolerant genotypes. Comparative DGE and qRT analysis revealed key role of ABA dependent & independent pathways, potassium & ABC membrane transporters (
At
ABCG22,
At
ABCG11,
At
ABCC5 &
At
ABCC4) and antioxidant defence system against oxidative stress in tolerant genotypes, while seems to be failed in sensitive genotypes. Additionally, highly expressed UPL3HECT E3 ligases and RING E3 ligases possibly enhance drought tolerance by actively regulating functional modification of stress related genes. Further, ascertainment of, 80803 high quality putative SNPs with functional validation of key non-synonymous SNPs suggested their implications for developing high-throughput genotyping platform in tea. Futuristically, functionally relevant genomic resources can be potentially utilized for gene discovery, genetic engineering and marker-assisted genetic improvement for better yield and quality in tea under drought conditions.