A Floral Transcriptome for Hippeastrum (Amaryllidaceae)

Two transcriptomes have been constructed from floral tissue of two Hippeastrum (Amaryllidaceae) species, H. brasilianum (Traub & J.L.Doran) Dutilh and H. papilio (Ravenna) Van Scheepan.  The former has fragrant flowers, while flowers of the latter do not produce floral fragrance.  RNA was isolated and shipped to the Beijing Genomics Institute for cDNA library construction, sequencing and assembly.  For H. brasilianum (the data for H. papilio have not yet been received) we obtained 51,814,100 clean reads comprising 4,663,269,000 nucleotides with a quality score of 95.44%.   The mean GC content was 45.36%. Total number of contigs formed was 200,756 with a mean length of 254 nt.  The total number of unigenes identified was 71,532, with a mean length of 594 nt,  of which 67,327 were distinct singletons.  The functional classification of the unigenes will be discussed.  We are interested in performing in silica subtraction on both transcriptomes in the hopes of isolating genes implicated in the production and expression of floral fragrance.  F₁ hybrids and back cross populations have been created to assist in the understanding of  the genetics of fragrance expression in Hippeastrum.  We are also interested in developing a library single nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) for the genus.