Sequencing and Analysis of the Transcriptomes of Young Ovaries of Lantana

Lantana camara is a popular landscape plant and an important crop to the nursery and landscape industry, yet it has exhibited considerable invasiveness in certain regions and countries in the world. Efforts are being made to sterilize L. camara through production and selection of sterile triploids. These efforts have been hampered by the ability of L. camara to produce unreduced female gametes (UFGs) and apomictic seeds. In this study we report the sequencing and analysis of the transcriptomes of young ovaries of L. camara cultivar ‘Landmark White’ and breeding line GDGHOP36, which have different levels of ability to produce UFGs and apomictic seeds. Approximately 57 million sequence reads were obtained for each cultivar from Illumina HiSeq 2000 sequencing. Read assembling in Trinity software resulted in 74,029 unigenes with an average length of 1,038 nucleotides and N50 of 1,635 nucleotides. Functional analysis of the transcriptomes enabled annotation of 50,167 unigenes. There were 18,595 unigenes that were differentially expressed (DEGs) between the cultivar and the breeding line, and 1,467 DEGs seem to be related to cell cycle control, cell division, and chromosome partitioning. There were 12,091 simple sequence repeats (SSRs) in the assembled unigenes, dinucleotides SSRs being mostly present 5639 times with AG/CT being the most abundant one with 3588 times present among dinucleotide SSRs. Single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) search resulted in the identification of 89,252 and 101,976 SNPs sites in ‘Landmark White’ and breeding line GDGHOP36, respectively. Transition (A-G and C-T) SNPs were more common, with 53,455 and 61,182 sites in each genotype, respectively. The obtained sequences, gene expression data, SSRs, and SNPs will be used to further our understanding of the formation of UFGs and apomictic seeds in lantana.