| Zostera marina is an important ecological seagrass to elucidate the molecular genetic basis of adaptation to environmental stresses especially salt stress. This monotyledonous halophyte has unique morphological characteristics that allow it to tolerate the high salt in seawater. However, the mechanisms underlying the tolerance remain poorly understood due to limited transcriptomic and genomic data. Fortunately, next generation sequencing technology (NGS) is a powerful tool for de novo sequencing, aiming to find out critical genes and pathways associated with the salt tolerance.In this study, we used Illumina Paired-end sequencing of a normalized cDNA library and de novo assembly to obtain an adult Z. marina transcriptome in response to different stresses, consisting of about 54 million sequencing reads representing 58,457 transcripts (average length of 1544 bp) that correspond to 24,217 unigenes (average length of 1006bp). A total of 14,389 (59.41%) unigenes were annotated by blast searches against the NCBI non-redundant protein database.45.18% and 46.91% of the unigenes had significant similarity with proteins in Swiss-Prot database and Pfam database respectively, and 7,195 (29.71%) unigenes were assigned to eukaryotic Ortholog Groups (KOG). Out of these,13,897 unigenes were assigned to 57 Gene Ontology (GO) terms and in functional annotation against Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathway database,4745 unigenes were identified and mapped to 233 pathways. We also compared the orthologous gene family of the transcriptome of the Z. marina, Porphyra yezoensis and Oryza sativa, and 11,667 orthologous gene families are specific to Z.marina. In addition we identified the genes of the photoreceptors sensing red/farred light and blue light. Furthermore, we identified a large number of genes that are involved in ion transporters and channels including Na+ efflux, K+ uptake,Cl.channels, and H+ pumping relating to salt sensing, ion uptake, ion transport and ion compartmentalization. |
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