Comparative transcriptomics of leaves of five mulberry accessions and cataloguing structural and expression variants for future prospects

Abstract

Bombyx mori, a monophagous insect, prefers leaves of the certain species of Morus more than others. The preference has been attributed to morphological and anatomical features and biochemical compounds. In the present manuscript a comparison has been made among the transcriptome of leaves of the two preferred cultivated varieties and three wild types species. While assembling, high quality transcriptomes of five genotypes were constructed with a total of 100930, 151245, 89724, 181761 and 102908 transcripts from ML, MN, MS, K2 and V1 samples respectively. Further, to compare them, orthologs were identified from these assembled transcriptome. A total of 22462, 23413, 23685, 24371, 18362, 22326, 20058, 18049, 17567 and 20518 clusters of orthologs were found in one to one comparison in KvsN, KvsL, KvsS, KvsV, LvsN, LvsS, LvsV, NvsS, NvsV, and SvsV respectively. 4236 orthologs with algebraic connectivity of 1.0 were then used to compare and to find out differentially expressed transcripts from all the genotypes. A total of 1037 transcripts expressed that include some of the important morphology, anatomy and biochemical pathways regulating transcription factors (AP2/ERFs and C2H2 Zinc fingers) and signalling components were identified to express differentially. Further, these transcriptomes were used find out markers (SSR) and variants and a total of 1101013, 537245, 970877, 310437, 675772, 338400, 581189, 751477, 514999 and 257107 variants including SNP, MNP, Insertions and deletions were found in one to one comparisons. Taken together, our data could be highly useful for mulberry community worldwide as it could be utilized in mulberry breeding programs.