Manjusha Verma
ICAR-National Bureau of Plant Genetic Resources, India
Title: Leaf transcriptome sequencing for SSR development and linkage map construction in bottle gourd
Biography
Biography: Manjusha Verma
Abstract
Despite the worldwide consumption and medicinal importance of bottle gourd (Lageneria siceraria) is not thoroughly investigated in molecular biology barring a few reports on genetic diversity analyses. Using high-throughput Illumina RNA sequencing, we analyzed a L. siceraria (variety Pusa Santushti) leaf transcriptome and 17.4 million clean reads were assembled into 19594 unigenes averaging 1195 bp. Among them, 18000 (91.8%) unigenes were annotated with a BLAST search against the NCBI Non-Redundant (NR) database and 2592 (13.3%) were detected that contained one or more simple sequence repeats (SSRs). From these SSR-containing sequences, 808 candidate SSR markers were developed and experimentally tested, validating (%) novel polymorphic SSR markers. Then, a consensus SSR-based linkage map was constructed with SSR markers distributed in 11 linkage groups. Both transcriptome information and the genetic map of L. siceraria presented here offer a valuable foundation for molecular biology investigations such as functional gene isolation, QTL mapping and marker-assisted selection breeding in this important vegetable species as well as related cucurbit crops.