Transcriptome Profiling of Two Ornamental and Medicinal Papaver Herbs

Abstract

The <i>Papaver</i> spp. (<i>Papaver rhoeas</i> (Corn poppy) and <i>Papaver nudicaule</i> (Iceland poppy)) genera are ornamental and medicinal plants that are used for the isolation of alkaloid drugs. In this study, we generated 700 Mb of transcriptome sequences with the PacBio platform. They were assembled into 120,926 contigs, and 1185 (82.2%) of the benchmarking universal single-copy orthologs (BUSCO) core genes were completely present in our assembled transcriptome. Furthermore, using 128 Gb of Illumina sequences, the transcript expression was assessed at three stages of <i>Papaver</i> plant development (30, 60, and 90 days), from which we identified 137 differentially expressed transcripts. Furthermore, three co-occurrence heat maps are generated from 51 different plant genomes along with the <i>Papaver</i> transcriptome, i.e., secondary metabolite biosynthesis, isoquinoline alkaloid biosynthesis (BIA) pathway, and cytochrome. Sixty-nine transcripts in the BIA pathway along with 22 different alkaloids (quantified with LC-QTOF-MS/MS) were mapped into the BIA KEGG map (map00950). Finally, we identified 39 full-length cytochrome transcripts and compared them with other genomes. Collectively, this transcriptome data, along with the expression and quantitative metabolite profiles, provides an initial recording of secondary metabolites and their expression related to <i>Papaver</i> plant development. Moreover, these profiles could help to further detail the functional characterization of the various secondary metabolite biosynthesis and <i>Papaver</i> plant development associated problems.