Comparative Analysis of Transcriptome during Organogenesis in Sunflower, Jatropha and Castor, Three Important Oilseeds

Sunflower is a major source of edible oil while Jatropha and castor produce important non-edible oils which are promising sources of hydrocarbons and have great industrial value including their utility as aviation and bio fuels. The cotyledons from mature seeds and at three different stages during in vitro culture were collected and RNA was isolated from the samples. The RNA from the dissected cotyledons was used as control whereas the three different organogenesis stages were pooled together into a single sample. The total RNA from the samples was used for preparing strand specific libraries after depletion of ribosomal RNAs. The libraries were sequenced to obtain about 40 million paired end reads from each sample. The reads were preprocessed and a de novo assembly was carried out for the individual plant species. Most of the assembled transcripts were in the size range of 1-3 kb size. Differential gene expression studies were done between the controls against the different organogenesis stages and also between the three different crop species to understand the key genes specifically associated with organogenesis.