De novo sequencing and analysis of the American ginseng root transcriptome using a GS FLX Titanium platform to discover putative genes involved in ginsenoside biosynthesis.

ABSTRACT:

Background

American ginseng (Panax quinquefolius L.) is one of the most widely used herbal remedies in the world. Its major bioactive constituents are the triterpene saponins known as ginsenosides. However, little is known about ginsenoside biosynthesis in American ginseng, especially the late steps of the pathway.

Results

In this study, a one-quarter 454 sequencing run produced 209,747 high-quality reads with an average sequence length of 427 bases. De novo assembly generated 31,088 unique sequences containing 16,592 contigs and 14,496 singletons. About 93.1% of the high-quality reads were assembled into contigs with an average 8-fold coverage. A total of 21,684 (69.8%) unique sequences were annotated by a BLAST similarity search against four public sequence databases, and

SUBMITTER: Sun C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2873478 | biostudies-literature | 2010 Apr

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature