De novo Assembly of Perilla citriodora for Gene Discovery Using RNA-Seq

The high quality of gene set is necessary to study the functional research of genes. Although perilla is cultivated as an oil crop and as a vegetable crop in Asian countries such as Korea, Japan, northeast China and Nepal, the reference genome is absent.

To assembly perilla gene set, we sequenced the leaves of perilla (Perilla citriodora) RNA-seq with Illumina platform, generating 58,650,146 short reads. We performed de novo assembly with Velvet/Oases and Trinity software, and 53,562 and 82,986 transcripts were assembled, respectively.

Using plant protein database at Phytozome ver. 9.1 (1,917,424 proteins), we annotated the perilla assembled transcripts, and 48,646(81.22%) and 53,831(64.87%) transcripts showed the similarity with known plant proteins (E-value < 1e-10), respectively. In addition, we surveyed the candidate genes composed of monoterpene metabolic pathway, which this is related to the mint-like flavor of perilla leaf, and secured the sequence of these genes in Perilla citriodora.