De novo assembly and annotation of the transcriptome of the endangered seagrass Zostera capensis: Insights from differential gene expression under thermal stress
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引用次数: 1
Abstract
Seagrasses are important marine ecosystem engineers but anthropogenic impacts and climate change have led to numerous population declines globally. In South Africa, Zostera capensis is endangered due to fragmented populations and heavy anthropogenic pressures on estuarine ecosystems that house the core of the populations. Addressing questions of how pressures such as climate change affect foundational species, including Z. capensis are crucial to supporting their conservation and underpin restoration efforts. Here we use ecological transcriptomics to study key functional responses of Z. capensis through quantification of gene expression after thermal stress and present the first reference transcriptome of Z. capensis. Four de novo reference assemblies (Trinity, IDBA-tran, RNAspades, SOAPdenovo) filtered through the EvidentialGene pipeline resulted in 153,755 transcripts with a BUSCO score of 66.1% for completeness. Differential expression analysis between heat stressed (32 °C for three days) and pre-warming plants identified genes involved in photosynthesis, oxidative stress, translation, metabolic and biosynthetic processes in the Z. capensis thermal stress response. This reference transcriptome is a significant contribution to the limited available genomic resources for Z. capensis and represents a vital tool for addressing questions around the species restoration and potential functional responses to warming marine environments.
期刊介绍:
The journal publishes papers on all functional and evolutionary aspects of genes, chromatin, chromosomes and (meta)genomes of marine (and freshwater) organisms. It deals with new genome-enabled insights into the broader framework of environmental science. Topics within the scope of this journal include:
• Population genomics and ecology
• Evolutionary and developmental genomics
• Comparative genomics
• Metagenomics
• Environmental genomics
• Systems biology
More specific topics include: geographic and phylogenomic characterization of aquatic organisms, metabolic capacities and pathways of organisms and communities, biogeochemical cycles, genomics and integrative approaches applied to microbial ecology including (meta)transcriptomics and (meta)proteomics, tracking of infectious diseases, environmental stress, global climate change and ecosystem modelling.