Differential Expression of Salt Stress Induced Genes in Paulownia elongata

Paulownia elongata, a short rotation, fast growing tree, holds potential for large amount of biomass and lignocellulosic biofuel production. Understanding the tolerance of the plant to abiotic stresses such as salinity is important for future biomass development.  This experiment investigates the genome wide transcriptome of Paulownia elongata under salt stress through the use of RNA-seq.  Plants were salt-stressed by growing in the medium containing 100 mM NaCl for 10-days while controls were treated with distilled water under the same conditions.  RNA-seq libraries from the treated and control plants were prepared from the extracted RNA using the TruSeq RNA Sample Prep Kit (v2). After validation and quantification the libraries were sequenced on an Ilumina MiSeq System. A de novo Paulownia elongata transcriptome was generated from pooling all of the 39,238,866 Illumina 75 bp reads and assembling using Trinity software (v2.0.6). Using the Tuxedo software suite we quantified the gene expression profiles and compared differences between the salt stressed and control plants. We identified thousands of genes that were up regulated, down regulated, turned off and turned on under salinity conditions compared to the controls. Currently, gene expressions are being validated using RT-qPCR.