High Quality de Novo Transcriptome Assembly of Croton tiglium

2018 
Croton tiglium is one of more than 1,200 different species in the large genus Croton, belonging to the family Euphorbiaceae (Kalwij, 2012; The Plant List, 2014). C. tiglium can be found in subtropical and tropical regions on both hemispheres (Salatino et al., 2007). This plant was first mentioned in the medical literature over 2,200 years ago in China. The medical relevance is probably due to a huge variety of different secondary metabolites (Pope, 1824). Traditionally utilized as a purgative to treat gastrointestinal and intestinal disorders, as an abortifacient and counterirritant, the commercially available seed oil of C. tiglium is nowadays applied in homeopathy and acupuncture (Glaser et al., 1988). The pharmacologic mechanism of the laxative properties of ethanol extracts of C. tiglium has been studied on rat intestinal epithelium (Tsai et al., 2004). C. tiglium produces various phorbol esters, including substances that were reported to be tumor-promoting (Van Duuren et al., 1963), antileukemic and antimycobacterial (Goel et al., 2007; Salatino et al., 2007), and even candidates for the treatment of HIV (El-Mekkawy et al., 2000). Beside the tumor-promoting factors, some cytotoxic phorbol esters were isolated from plant extracts and evaluated in cell culture assays (Zhang et al., 2013). In contrast to the co-carcinogenic substances, C. tiglium was shown to produce a ribonucleoside analog of guanosine with antitumor activity (Kim et al., 1994). In this work, we present a comprehensive de novo transcriptome assembly of C. tiglium based on a normalized library to cover a huge variety of transcripts. In addition, tissue-specific transcript libraries were generated to enable differential gene expression analysis between tissues. This will facilitate the identification of candidate genes involved in growth, development, and metabolism of this plant species.
    • Correction
    • Source
    • Cite
    • Save
    • Machine Reading By IdeaReader
    29
    References
    22
    Citations
    NaN
    KQI
    []