Transcriptome profiling in conifers and the PiceaGenExpress database show patterns of diversification within gene families and interspecific conservation in vascular gene expression (original) (raw)

Comparative Transcriptomics Among Four White Pine Species

G3 (Bethesda, Md.), 2018

Conifers are the dominant plant species throughout the high latitude boreal forests as well as some lower latitude temperate forests of North America, Europe, and Asia. As such, they play an integral economic and ecological role across much of the world. This study focused on the characterization of needle transcriptomes from four ecologically important and understudied North American white pines within the subgenus The populations of many species are challenged by native and introduced pathogens, native insects, and abiotic factors. RNA from the needles of western white pine (), limber pine (), whitebark pine (, and sugar pine () was sampled, Illumina short read sequenced, and assembled. The assembled transcripts and their subsequent structural and functional annotations were processed through custom pipelines to contend with the challenges of non-model organism transcriptome validation. Orthologous gene family analysis of over 58,000 translated transcripts, implemented through Tri...