| description |
Medicinal and industrial properties of phytochemicals (eq., glycyrrhizin) from the root of Glycyrrhiza uralensis (licorice plant) made it an attractive, multimillion-dollar trade item. Bioengineering of plants is one of the solutions to answer such high market demand and to prevent plants from the extinction. Unfortunately limited genomic information on medicinal plants restricts their research and thus biosynthetic mechanisms of many important phytochemicals are still poorly understood. In this work we leveraged the power of de-novo (no reference genome sequence available) assembly of Illumina RNA-seq data to study the transcriptome of the licorice plant. Our analysis is based on sequencing results of libraries made from samples that belonged to different tissues (root an leaf) and were collected at different seasons and from two slightly distinct strains (glycyrrhizin low and high producing strain). We provide functional annotations and the expression profile of 43,882 assembled unigenes, which are suitable for various further studies. Here, we searched for Glycyrrhiza uarlensis specific enzymes involved in isoflavonoid biosynthesis as well as elucidated putative Cytochrome P450 (CYP) enzymes and putative vacuolar saponin transporters involved in glycyrrhizin production in the licorice root. To disseminate the data and the analysis results we constructed publicly available the Glycyrrhiza uralensis database. This work will contribute to a better understanding of the secondary metabolites biosynthetic pathways in licorice plants, and possibly in other medicinal plants, and will provide an important resource to further advance transcriptomics studies in legumes. |