Differential genomic expression profiles in Yerba Mate (Ilex paraguariensis, A. St.-Hil.)

FAY JESSICA. V, LITWINIUK S., TALAVERA STEFANI L.N., ARGÜELLES C.F., FERRERAS J.A.,; MIRETTI, M.

Foz do Iguacu

Congreso; International Congress of Genetics - SBG; 2017

Sociedade Brasilera de Genética

?Yerba Mate? (Aquifoliaceae) is a native tree cultivated in South America. Themanufacture/production of dried Yerba Mate (YM) leaves drives regional economies inArgentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. Reports demonstrated that YM infusionscontain secondary metabolites with relevant pharmacological properties. Global geneexpression profiling provides a key insight into the plant physiology underlying relevantphenotypic features, namely dry leaves yield and contents, responses to environmentaland biological factors. In this study we evaluated differences in gene expressionprofiles among tissues derived from 15 YM RNA-Seq libraries. To estimate relativeexpression activity across tissues (leaves, root and seedling), paired-end reads fromeach RNAseq library were aligned to a de novo transcriptome assembly using Bowtie 2package and read counts estimated with RSEM software. Differential gene expressionanalysis was performed using DESeq v1.14.1 software. From ~20,000 unigenes,approximately 2/3 and 1/3 were up- and down-regulated in leaf vs root, respectively.As expected, in the 30 top transcripts with the most contrasting differential expression?leaf vs root- up-regulated transcripts in leaf contains encoding proteins genesinvolved in Photosynthesis such as chlorophyll binding protein, oxygen evolvingenhancer,light-harvesting complex, and heat shock proteins. Correlation plots andclustering analysis revealed (1) a coherent grouping of experimental replicas, (2) thepresence of within-tissue inter-individual variations, and (3) significant differentiallyexpressed genes among tissues (four-fold change, p-value cut-off of ≤ 0.001).Disparities between leaves were associated to genes involved in plant immunity, plantpathogeninteraction and synthesis of antioxidant compounds. Transcriptomic datagenerated are relevant set the context for further experiments.Funding Agency: INYM, CONICET, MINCYT