Constructing Gene Co Expression Networks to Capture Interaction Modules Contributing to Biosynthesis and Accumulation of Iridoid Glycosides in a Medicinal Herb Picrorhiza kurroa

Abstract

Plants are repertoire of bioactive chemical entities. The current knowledge of biosynthetic newlineroutes in medicinal plants are mostly based upon target based molecular biology approaches, newlinetherefore, only partial information is available. The recent developments of Next Gene newlineSequencing (NGS) have generated high quality datasets that have provided key components newlinerelated to various biological functions particularly in medicinal plant species. The last decade newlinehas resulted in development of some special computational tools to do high throughput analysis newlinepin-pointing components representing functional modules. newlineThe gene co-expression networks are one such strategy based on the concept of graph theory newlinethat represents the relationship between genes based on gene expression in different newlinecircumstances i.e., tissue specific, temperature, disease phenotypes, etc. The current study newlinefocused on unravelling the complexity of the biosynthesis of iridoid glycosides in newlinehepatoprotctive medicinal herb Picrorhiza kurroa. Furthermore, comparative gene coexpression- newlinenetwork analysis among transcriptomes derived from different tissues/ organs newlinevarying for iridoid glycosides pinpointed major hubs of acyltransferases belonging to BAHDATs. newlineThe study also developed a computational approach aimed at identification of SNPs newlinethrough GBS analysis in a collection of 41 Picrorhiza kurroa populations, followed by newlineconstruction of gene co-expression networks and mapping those SNPs to functional modules newline(hubs) capturing their functionality. Overall outcome of study has practical implications in newlinedesigning genome engineering strategy for controlled production of iridoid glycosides.