GSE109931
Gene expression profiling allows the identification of pathways involved in seeds development of Jatropha curcas
Jatropha curcas, a tropical shrub, is an attractive biofuel crop, which produces seeds with a high content of oil and protein. Most J. curcas accessions contain a range of toxins and anti-nutritional compounds, which are unfavorable for human consumption and animal feed. With the goal of better understanding the development of its seeds and to improve Jatropha`s agronomic performance, a two-step approach was performed: 1) generation of the entire transcriptome of six different developmental stages of J. curcas seeds using 454-Roche sequencing of a cDNA library, 2) comparison of transcriptional expression levels in six different developmental stages of seeds using a custom Agilent 8x60K oligonucleotide gene expression microarray. A total of 793,875 high quality reads with an average length of 358 bp were generated and assembled into 19,841 unique full-length contigs, of which 13,705 could be annotated with GO terms. Microarray data analysis identified a total of 9,111 contigs which were differentially expressed between the six developmental stages (based on P-value of < 1e-8). The microarray-based differential expression results were validated for 192 putative genes using high-throughput quantitative real-time PCR. Results from Gene Ontology (GO) and pathway enrichment analysis showed that the upstream biosynthesis pathways were relatively active among differentially expressed sequences (DESs) during seed development, such as starch and sucrose metabolism, glycolysis/gluconeogenesis, glycerophospholipid metabolism, amino sugar and nucleotide sugar metabolism. Further, DESs related to hormone and seed development, flavonoid biosynthesis-related pathways were over-represented. A pairwise comparison was used to discover particular seed maturation dependent patterns of gene expression. Genes related to fatty acid biosynthesis were over represented in early stage, while flavonoid biosynthesis in the late stage. The data provide a useful resources and references for the seed transcriptome of J. curcas and other related species with oil producing seeds. The identified transcripts related to seed development provide a starting point for further investigation into the molecular mechanisms underlying this process. Overall design: whole transcriptomes of leaves and seeds of toxic and non-toxic plants (n=32) at six different developmental stage were characterised on custom designed Agilent microarrays