Transcriptome Analysis of Aegle marmelos (L.) Correa Fruit and Leaf Tissues: An Underexploited Fruit Tree

Abstract

Aegle marmelos (L) Correa is both a horticultural and medicinally important tree in South-East Asia. Both of its fruits and leaves have several medicinal values including treatment of certain chronic diseases. Despite its importance, the genomic resource of this tree is very scarce. The objectives of this work were to conduct a de novo transcriptome assembly of leaf tissue from A. marmelos, locally known as bael in India. Comparison studies were conducted between the fruit transcriptome and leaf transcriptome of A. marmelos. This is the first time that the fruit transcriptome of A. marmelos has been reported in the literature. There were 47 million clean reads were generated for fruit tissue and 34 million clean reads of leaf tissue. The reads were assembled to 61, 860 unigenes. Around 83% of fruit transcripts were mapped to the original assembly whereas 89% of leaf transcripts were mapped to the original assembly. Whereas, in terms of molecular function, the gene ontology (GO) terms were related to binding, cellular activity and transporter activity and genes expressed only in leaf and fruit tissue were 14,578 and 11086, respectively, Overall, RNA sequencing may be an effective method for determining the pathway and genes in the underexploited fruit crops.