Biotechnology and genetics
Mehdi Hassanlou; Mohammad Reza Azimi Moghaddam; Seyed Alireza Salamii; Ehsan Mohsenifard
Abstract
Cultivated saffron (Crocus sativus L.) boasts remarkable commercial value due to its possessing three pivotal metabolites: crocin, picrocrocin, and safranal. The significance of obtaining these metabolites, particularly crocin, from sources other than cultivated saffron has grown substantially, primarily ...
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Cultivated saffron (Crocus sativus L.) boasts remarkable commercial value due to its possessing three pivotal metabolites: crocin, picrocrocin, and safranal. The significance of obtaining these metabolites, particularly crocin, from sources other than cultivated saffron has grown substantially, primarily driven by native wild saffron species in Iran. In this ongoing study, High-Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) has been harnessed as a potent analytical tool for the identification of these metabolites in two wild saffron species, Khazar (C. caspius) and Ziba (C. specious), alongside the cultivated variety. Furthermore, bioinformatics tools have been employed to extract nucleotide and protein sequences, thereby facilitating the prediction of protein structures for genes integral to the biosynthesis process of these notable apocarotenoids in an in-silico manner. The research findings have showcased the presence of crocin across all analyzed samples, albeit in varying quantities. Specifically, the crocin content in the cultivated saffron, Ziba, and Khazar species accounted for 26.76%, 2.8%, and 0.74% of dry weight matter, respectively. However, the amount of picrocrocin and safranal metabolites in cultivated species was 8.4 and 0.03 percent, respectively, but there were no detectable amounts of these apocarotenoids in the studied wild species. , The existence of crocin in wild species has made hope for conducting research and searching in wild species for these effective substances and implementing breeding programs or genetic manipulation for the mentioned species.
Biotechnology and genetics
Mehdi Hassanlou; Mohammad Reza Azimi Moghaddam; Seyed Alireza Salami; Ehsan Mohsenifard
Abstract
Agricultural saffron Crocus sativus L. is a medicinal, widely used and expensive plant and has important effective substances: crocin, picrocrocin and safranal, which gives it the characteristics of color, taste and smell. The search for new sources producing the aforementioned apocarotenoids makes the ...
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Agricultural saffron Crocus sativus L. is a medicinal, widely used and expensive plant and has important effective substances: crocin, picrocrocin and safranal, which gives it the characteristics of color, taste and smell. The search for new sources producing the aforementioned apocarotenoids makes the importance of research on it more obvious day by day. Since the country of Iran has diploid wild species with characteristics close to the sterile triploid cultivated species, in the present research, two species of Caspian saffron C. caspius and Zeiba C. Speciosus, along with the cultivated species, were investigated and 6 genes active in the production of the three mentioned effective substances , CCD2, ALDH, PSY, LCY, BCH, UGT74 (and a housekeeping gene TUB as an internal control gene with constant expression in all tissues) in two flower tissues, stigma and perianth (tepal) and in five stages (time) of flowering including: The stages of bud formation (immature bud), bud ready to bloom, newly opened flower, mature flower and old flower were investigated. Using of Real Time PCR, the expression ratio (fold change) to the internal control gene (with logarithm based on 2) was investigated in different genes and different and sometimes similar expression patterns were observed with the gene expression in the cultivated species in both the stigma and stigma tissues. Based on the results obtained in this study and the increase or decrease in the expression of some genes involved in the pathways of apocarotenoids production, at the same time as the growth of the stages from the bud to the senescence stage of the flower, it is expected from the three aforementioned substances or from other apocarotenoids in the metabolom of flowers, cases have been found in the non-triploid species and create approaches for the commercial use of Iranian wild saffron species and pave the way for its commercialization.
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 ...
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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, ...
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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 .
