Project description:Pea (Pisum. sativum L.) is a traditional and important edible legume that can be sorted into grain pea and vegetable pea according to their harvested maturely or not. Vegetable pea by eating the fresh seed is becoming more and more popular in recent years. These two type peas display huge variations of the taste and nutrition, but how seed development and nutrition accumulation of grain pea and vegetable pea and their differences at the molecular level remains poorly understood. To understand the genes and gene networks regulate seed development in grain pea and vegetable pea, high throughput RNA-Seq and bioinformatics analysis were used to compare the transcriptomes of vegetable pea and grain pea developing seed. RNA-Seq generated 18.7 G raw data, which was then de novo assembled into 77,273 unigenes with a mean length of 930 bp. Functional annotation of the unigenes was carried out using the nr, Swiss-Prot, COG, GO and KEGG databases. There were 459 and 801 genes showing differentially expressed between vegetable pea and grain pea at early and late seed maturation phases, respectively. Sugar and starch metabolism related genes were dramatically activated during pea seed development. The up-regulated of starch biosynthesis genes could explain the increment of starch content in grain pea then vegetable pea; while up-regulation of sugar metabolism related genes in vegetable pea then grain pea should participate in sugar accumulation and associated with the increase in sweetness of vegetable pea then grain pea. Furthermore, transcription factors were implicated in the seed development regulation in grain pea and vegetable pea. Thus, our results constitute a foundation in support of future efforts for understanding the underlying mechanism that control pea seed development and also serve as a valuable resource for improved pea breeding.
