Biotechnology and genetics
Maryam Vahedi; Seyed Alireza Salami; Majid Shokrpour; Hassan Rezadoost
Abstract
Saffron (Crocus sativus L.) belonging to Iridaceae family as a source of apocarotenoids is one of the most valuable spices and medicinal plants in the world. Because of the large size and high complexity of saffron genome, its sequencing remains a challenge. The arrival of next-generation sequencing ...
Read More
Saffron (Crocus sativus L.) belonging to Iridaceae family as a source of apocarotenoids is one of the most valuable spices and medicinal plants in the world. Because of the large size and high complexity of saffron genome, its sequencing remains a challenge. The arrival of next-generation sequencing technologies (NGS) has allowed the rapid and efficient development for RNA sequencing. De novo assembly of transcriptome from short-read RNA-Seq data provides a great resource for the study of species without a reference genome. De novo assembly of the transcriptome has some unique challenges, particularly in the case of plants, which possess a large amount of paralogs, orthologs, homoeologs and isoforms. In this research, we attempted to compare the performance of de novo assembly tools including BinPacker, Bridger, Oases-Velvet and Trinity through consideration of a quality metrics such as N50 length, the total number of contigs and alignment scores. The results of these analyses revealed that assembly using Bridger had a superior performance for saffron transcriptome, Oases suffered from relatively high chimera rates and redundancies which causes genes family with high similarity assembled into one transcript, Trinity performs worse than Bridger in the increase of false positives. Our comparison study will assist researchers in selecting a well-suited assembler and offer essential information for the improvement of existing assemblers.
Biotechnology and genetics
Majid Shokrpour; Zeinab Abedi; Siamak Kalantari; Seyed Alireza Salami
Abstract
Saffron (Crocus sativus L.) is one of the most valuable medicinal and spice herbs in the world. In spite of the ancient cultivation history in Iran, there are limited breeding studies on the plant due to its vegetative reproduction. In order to evaluation genetic diversity of Iranian saffron germplasm, ...
Read More
Saffron (Crocus sativus L.) is one of the most valuable medicinal and spice herbs in the world. In spite of the ancient cultivation history in Iran, there are limited breeding studies on the plant due to its vegetative reproduction. In order to evaluation genetic diversity of Iranian saffron germplasm, sixty-five different saffron accessions from the main cultivation areas in Khorasan including Torbat heidarieh, Gonabad, Mahvelat, Ghaenat and Ferdows were collected and were studied by molecular markers. The used RAPD and ISSR primers produced 43 and 122 polymorphic markers loci, respectively, and totally 165 markers with average of 7.5 markers by each primer, totally. Diversity index ranged from 0.36 to 0.7 with average of 0.23. Also, marker index with the average of 0.16 varied in the range of 0.2 to 0.7. The accessions from Ghaenat and Mahvelat had the maximum (83.03%) and the minimum (52.73%) polymorphism, respectively. Grouping the studied saffron accessions using cluster analysis displayed four distinct groups which had little correspondence to their collection areas, while clustering for the main cultivation areas had relatively good correspondence to their geographical distances. So, it is expected to have nearly approaching improvements of qualitative and quantitative yields via the selection of superior clones of saffron. Key words: Saffron, Molecular variation, Germplasm, RAPD, ISSR, Khorasan region, clustering .
