Project description:Thuja sutchuenensis Franch., an endangered species sparsely distributed in the mountainous and arid regions of southwest China, faces the critical challenge of adapting to these harsh conditions. Understanding the plant's strategies for survival and the precise roles played by soil fungal communities in this adaptation remains an area of limited knowledge. Our investigation centers on the fungal communities associated with T. sutchuenensis and their interactions with soil water content. Notably, we identified unique fungal communities in the low soil moisture group, and these communities exhibited lower coverage but higher phylogenetic diversity (PD), Chao1, and Shannon indices compared to other groups. Network analysis revealed a modular structure within the fungal communities, with key hub nodes identified, particularly in the arid group. This group demonstrated higher levels of soil saprotrophs and ectomycorrhizal fungi and a reduced presence of plant pathogens. Linear discriminant analysis highlighted the significance of genera such as Russula, Myxotrichaceae, and Sebacina, emphasizing their roles in supporting the plant in arid environments. Random forest analysis indicated that soil moisture content emerged as the primary driver in determining fungal composition and diversity and contributed to the variables of several fungal genera. Collectively, this study provides valuable insights into the fungal communities associated with T. sutchuenensis, shedding light on their adaptation to extreme arid conditions.
Project description:This analysis aimed to assess the effect of arborvitae (Thuja plicata) essential oil (AEO) in an in vitro model of cell lines derived from cervical cancer, namely HeLa and SiHa, by examining its influence on gene expression modulation. The working cell lines were HeLa, and SiHa. Total RNA sequencing was performed on the Illumina NovaSeq 6000 platform by Novogene Bioinformatics Technology Co., Ltd, Beijing, China, with two independent replicate sequences for each cell model. Methodology: The execution of the bioinformatics pipeline analysis was carried out as follow: R (ver. 4.3.1), RStudio (ver. 2023.09.1 +494) and Galaxy (https://www.usegalaxy.orgaccessed on 02 February 2024) open-source platforms were used to analyze the Illumina raw data. The Quality Check was conducted through the FastQC tool (v0.74+galaxy0). Afterward, all the reads were processed by the Rsubread package (v2.14.2); at that point, the reads were trimmed and aligned to the Human Genome Reference (GRCh38.p14 v44). The obtained output was the BAM files, of which the number of reads was counted by the FeatureCounts tool (v2.0.3); at the final step, the Differential Expression Analysis was settled by the DESeq2 package for R (ver. 1.42. 0). The differential gene expression measurements were normalized by DESeq2's median of ratios (median of ratio of gene counts relative to geometric mean per gene) method. All genes with an adjusted p-value (p-adj) minus or equal to 0.05 and fold change (Log2FC) up to 2 or less than minus 2 were selected as differentially expressed genes (DEGs). Conclusions: Our study found that AEO regulates genes related with cell cycle regulation, cell growth, differentiation, and cell death in both cell lines, mainly through downregulation; however, its effect appears to be mediated by different pathways in each cell line.