Cucurbit Expression Atlas

Transcriptome Analysis of Cucumber (Cucumis sativus L.) Leaves Under Chilling Stress (cucumber). Purpose: Next-generation sequencing (NGS) has revolutionized systems-based analysis of gene expression profiles of cucumber under short-term chilling stress. The goals of this study are to transcriptome analysis of cucumber leaves under chilling stress. Methods: mRNA profiles of seedlings exposed to an air temperature of 6°C in the absence of light at 0, 2, 6, and 12 h were generated by deep sequencing, in triplicate, using Illumina Hiseq platform. The reference genome and gene model annotation files were downloaded from the genome website （http://cucurbitgenomics.org/）. An index of the reference genome was built using Bowtie v.2.2.3 and paired-end clean reads were aligned to the reference genome using TopHat v.2.0.12. qRT–PCR validation was performed using SYBR Green assays. Results: A total of 55.7 million clean reads was generated. Based on the threshold values of absolute value of log2 ratio ≥ 1 and FDR ≤ 0.05, a total of 2113 DEGs was identified at three time points (2, 6, and 12 h). A total of 30 genes was detected at all time points. The number of DEGs increased with time. In total, 100 TFs from 22 families in three subsets were detected. And 19 kinase families were identified in three subsets. The DEGs identified by RNA sequencing were confirmed by qRT-PCR analysis, indicating that the data were reliable. These findings provide information that can be useful for investigating the molecular mechanisms underlying the response to chilling stress in cucumber and other plants. Conclusions: The results presented here reveal changes in the transcriptome profile of cucumber in response to chilling stress. Exposure to a low temperature induced genes involved in hormone regulation, lipid metabolism, and photosynthesis, including NAC, WRKY, AP2/ERF, ERD, MYB as well as zinc finger TFs and protein kinases such as receptor-like protein kinase, MAPK, and CDK. Most TFs were upregulated whereas CDKs were downregulated. These findings provide information that can be useful for investigating the molecular mechanisms underlying the response to chilling stress in cucumber and other plants. Overall design: mRNA profiles of seedlings exposed to an air temperature of 6°C in the absence of light at 0, 2, 6, and 12 h were generated by deep sequencing, in triplicate, using Illumina Hiseq platform. Raw data are not available for GSM3048831, GSM3048837 or GSM3048839 due to file corruption.