De novo transcriptome analysis of Parthenium hysterophorus L. and insights into its potential uses

Parthenium hysterophorus L. is a notorious weed, which significantly reduce yield and quality of crops and causes several problems to human health. In, present study an attempt was made to understand the economic value, and survival nature of Parthenium through deep transcriptome analysis. Transcriptome analysis of leaf and root tissue of P. hysterophorus had resulted 7,832,143 reads in case of leaves, and 9,646,830 reads in case of roots sample with longest read length of 300 and 298 nucleotides, respectively. A total of 35,719 contigs were produced with an average length of 548bp after an assembly in all two samples. The Blastn of the above generated contigs with 61,901 sequences of P. argentatum resulted in the identification of 25,947 novel contigs specific to P. hysterophorus. The Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes pathway based analysis showed the expression of genes associated with pathways pertaining to biosynthesis of Glucosinolate, Amino acids, and Aminobenzoate degradation etc. The expression pattern of genes like Artemisinic aldehyde Delta (11(13)) reductase, Codeine O-demethylase, Taraxerol synthase, and Curculin-2 related to biosynthetic of therapeutic importance pathways was also evidenced. Further, the heavy metal accumulator property of P. hysterophorus was also studied. Expression analysis of heavy metal transporters such as ferrous ion transport protein B, and zinc transporter in roots was also validated with its heavy metal transport activity. This investigation provides new insights for functional studies of P. hysterophorus genes involved in biosynthesis of therapeutically important secondary metabolites, and other possible uses such as raw material for rubber industry.