Transcriptome profiling and comparative analysis of Panax ginseng adventitious roots – Accepted Manuscript

Abstract: Background: Panax ginseng Meyer is a traditional medicinal plant famous for its strong therapeutic effects and serves as an important herbal medicine. To understand and manipulate genes involved in secondary metabolic pathways including ginsenosides, transcriptome profiling of P. ginseng is essential.Methods: RNA-seq analysis of adventitious roots of two P. ginseng cultivars, Chunpoong (CP) and Cheongsun (CS), was performed using Illumina HiSeq platform. After transcript was assembled, expression profiling was performed.Results: The assemblies were generated from ∼85 and ∼77 million high-quality reads from CP and CS cultivars, respectively. A total of 35,527 and 27,716 transcripts were obtained from the CP and CS assemblies, respectively. Annotation of the transcriptomes showed that approximately 90% of the transcripts had significant matches in public databases. We identified several candidate genes involved in ginsenoside biosynthesis. In addition, a large number of transcripts (17%) with different GO designations were uniquely detected in adventitious roots compared to normal ginseng roots.Conclusion: This study will provide comprehensive insight into transcriptome of ginseng adventitious roots and a way for successful transcriptome analysis and profiling of resources plants with less genomics information. The transcriptome profiling data generated in this study are available in our newly created adventitious root transcriptome database (http://im-crop.snu.ac.kr/transdb/index.php) for public use.