Molecular Mechanisms of Crop Domestication Revealed by Comparative Analysis of the Transcriptomes Between Cultivated and Wild Soybeans
Abstract
Soybean is one of the key crops necessary to meet the food requirement of the increasing global population. However, in order to meet this need, the quality and quantity of soybean yield must be greatly enhanced. Soybean yield advancement depends on the presence of favorable genes in the genome pool that have significantly changed during domestication. To make use of those domesticated genes, this study involved seven cultivated, G. max, and four wild-type, G. soja, soybeans. Their genomes were studied from developing pods to decipher the molecular mechanisms underlying crop domestication. Specifically, their transcriptomes were analyzed comparatively to previous related studies, with the intention of contributing further to the literature. For these goals, several bioinformatics applications were utilized, including De novo transcriptome assembly, transcriptome abundance quantification, and discovery of differentially expressed genes (DEGs) and their functional annotations and network visualizations. The results revealed 1,247 DEGs, 916 of which were upregulated in the cultivated soybean in comparison to wild type. Findings were mostly corresponded to literature review results, especially regarding genes affecting two focused, domesticated-related pod-shattering resistance and seed size traits. These traits were shown to be upregulated in cultivated soybeans and down-regulated in wild type. However, the opposite trend was shown in disease-related genes, which were down-regulated or not even present in the cultivated soybean genome. Further, 47 biochemical functions of the identified DEGs at the cellular level were revealed, providing some knowledge about the molecular mechanisms of genes related to the two aforementioned subjected traits. While our findings provide valuable insight about the molecular mechanisms of soybean domestication attributed to annotation of differentially expressed genes and transcripts, these results must be dissected further and/or reprocessed with a higher number of samples in order to advance the field.
Subject
Molecular MechanismsCrop Domestication
Soybean
Transcriptome Analysis
Cultivated Soybean
Wild Soybean
Differentially Expressed Genes
Gene Annotation
Transcriptome Expression
Citation
Aci, Murat (2018). Molecular Mechanisms of Crop Domestication Revealed by Comparative Analysis of the Transcriptomes Between Cultivated and Wild Soybeans. Master's thesis, Texas A & M University. Available electronically from https : / /hdl .handle .net /1969 .1 /174102.