Transcriptome sequencing of the southermost patagonian tree species, Nothofagus pumilio

ESTRAVIS-BARCALÁ, M; ARANA, MV; GUICHOUX, E; HEER, K; ZIEGENHAGEN, B; MARCHELLI, P

Congreso; 23rd Congress of the International Union for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology. 44th Annual Meeting of the Brazilian Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology; 2015

Temperate Patagonian forests aredistributed along natural environmental gradients that might be imposingdifferent selection pressures on the native flora. Nothofagus pumilio,a highly important timber species, is distributed across a wide latitudinal range,constituting also the tree line at high altitudes. Thus, growing in zones ofcontrasting thermic and photoperiodic characteristics it renders an interestingmodel for predicting the fitness of trees along environmental gradients underdifferent climatic scenarios, as those predicted by the Global Climate Change(GCC). Simulations of GCC for Patagonia indicate a rise in the daily meantemperatures and a decrease in precipitations, affecting the current ecologicalniches of relevant tree species. The aim of this work was to study the effectof temperature on global patterns of gene expression in N. pumilio seedlings. For this purpose we performed RNA-seqexperiments at two contrasting temperatures (20°C and 34° C), and analysed theeffect of warm temperatures (34°C) on global patterns of gene expression.  In addition, through this work we obtainedthe first transcriptome for N. pumilio.This information will be useful as a base for SNPs discovery for future geneticstudies of populations distributed across thermic gradients.