Transcriptome Sequencing of Spinacia Germplasm

Spinach, Spinacia oleracea, is an economically important green leafy vegetable. The annual worldwide production of spinach was approximately 21 million tonnes in 2011, of which around 90% was produced in China. Currently genomic and genetic resources are very limited for spinach. We have been performing transcriptome sequencing (RNA-seq) using the Illumina HiSeq system on a collection of ~120 Spinacia accessions from three different groups: S. oleracea, S. tetrandra, and S. turkestanica. The resulting strand-specific RNA-seq reads were processed and assembled de novo into unigenes, which were further extensively annotated by blasting them against various protein databases. Gene Ontology (GO) terms were assigned to these unigenes and biochemical pathways were predicted. SSR and SNP markers were identified from the Spinacia transcriptome sequences. We will also discuss the phylogenetic relationship, genetic diversity and population structure of the ~120 Spinacia accessions derived from the analyses using a subset of SNPs that have sufficient information.