Skip to main content

Nicotiana glauca whole-genome investigation for cT-DNA study

Abstract

Objective

Nicotiana glauca (tree tobacco) is a naturally transgenic plant, containing sequences acquired from Agrobacterium rhizogenes by horizontal gene transfer. Besides, N. glauca contains a wide profile of alkaloids of medical interest.

Data description

We report a high-depth sequencing and de novo assembly of N. glauca full genome and analysis of genome elements with bacterial origin. The draft genome assembly is 3.2 Gb, with N50 size of 31.1 kbp. Comparative analysis confirmed the presence of single, previously described gT insertion. No evidence was acquired to support idea of multiple T-DNA insertions in the N. glauca genome. Our data is the first comprehensive de novo assembly of tree tobacco and provide valuable information for researches in pharmacological and in phylogenetic fields.

Objective

Nicotiana glauca (tree tobacco) is a member of the Solanaceae family, which includes important crops (potato, tomato, eggplant, pepper) and many medicinal plants [1]. This diploid plant is native to South America and is one of the first Nicotiana species with Agrobacterium cellular T-DNA (cT-DNA) [2]. Its cT-DNA is a partial, inverted repeat, called gT [3]. Tree tobacco belongs to the section Noctiflorae. Sequencing of the genomes of N. tomentosiformis and N. otophora (section Tomentosae) and N. tabacum (section Nicotiana) allowed the detection of previously unknown multiple cT-DNAs [4], raising the question whether there are other T-DNA insertions in the N. glauca. NGS data can help answer this question. Besides, N. glauca contains a profile of alkaloids different from N. tabacum [5]. The plant is used for medicinal purposes. Comparative analysis of genomic data of phylogenetically distant tobacco species will provide valuable information on the genetic basis for various traits, especially secondary metabolism. Our data complement the list of species for the comparative genomics of Nicotiana, which opens up new opportunities for pharmacological and phylogenetic studies.

Data description

One plant isolate was sequenced on Illumina HiSeq machine, yielding in total 210 Gb of raw sequence data. De novo assembly resulted in 385116 scaffolds, with N50 and L50 of 31.1 kbp and 27293 respectively. Genome size suggested by K-mer analysis is 2 Gb, while the final size of the assembled genome equaled 3.2 Gb. Comparative analyses of N. glauca scaffolds against genome assembly of N. tabacum TN90 cultivar strain resulted in 3.2 Gbp of aligned sequences median identity of 88%. T-DNA analysis revealed sequences homologous to agrobacterial genes orf13a, orf13, orf14, rolC, rolB and mis. The fragment of T-DNA obtained in the assembly is organized in an imperfect inverted repeat. The similarity of the nucleotide sequences, that we found, and sequence of gT, previously described by Suzuki [3] was 99%, while its similarity to Agrobacterium T-DNA is 77–89%. Sequences of PCR fragments, amplified from T-DNA/plantDNA junction areas, coincide with known ones (Acs. AB071335, AB071334).

Methodology

Sample collection

Leaf tissue of aseptic plants N. glauca was used for DNA extraction, with a modified version of Doyle and Doyle protocol [6], yielding 30 ng/μl of high molecular weight DNA.

Library construction

Purified genomic DNA from N. glauca was used to construct both pair-end and mate pair libraries in order to generate a high coverage de novo assembly. A pair-end library with an insert size of 350 bp was constructed using the TruSeq® Nano DNA Library Prep Reference Guide. To improve resolution of repeats during the assembly stage and scaffolding process, one mate pair library with an insert size of 4 kbp was constructed, according to the Nextera® Mate Pair Library Prep Reference Guide.

Read sequencing, quality analysis and filtering

Pair-end and mate pair libraries were sequenced on four and two lanes using Illumina HiSeq. Quality of raw reads was analyzed with the FastQC [7] program, followed by filtering and trimming raw PE reads with Trimgalore [8]. Mate pair raw reads were processed and splitted with Nextclip [9] and additionally filtered with Trimgalore [8].

Genome assembly

The genome was assembled with the MaSuRCA-3.2.2 genome assembler [10], [config in data file 1].

Whole genome alignment of Nicotiana glauca and Nicotiana tabacum

To identify the location of the N. glauca cT-DNA insertion relative to the N. tabacum genome, we mapped all N. glauca scaffolds to N. tabacum scaffolds downloaded from the Sol Genomics Network [11]. To increase accuracy of alignment we masked all known plant repeat classes and their homologs in the N. glauca genome. For repeat identification, we used the RepeatMasker software [12] and the latest Repbase Update library from 09.27.2017. For whole genome alignment, we used the Last software [13].

T-DNA analysis

The Last software [13] was used to carry out the alignment of the database, containing all known T-DNA-like sequences, that were detected as part of cT-DNA [data file 2], to the N. glauca genome. To reaffirm T-DNA/plantDNA junction areas Long PCR was carried out using “LONG PCR enzyme Mix” (Thermo scientific) according to the instructions for the kit (Table 1).

Table 1 Overview of data files

Limitations

85% of the mate pair library proved to be PCR duplicates, which we filtered before assembling. Low coverage of MP reads resulted in low N50 and big number of contigs and scaffolds. A better quality or/and a bigger number of MP libraries should be used in future to improve the assembly.

Abbreviations

T-DNA:

transferred DNA

PE:

pair-end

MP:

mate pair

References

  1. Long N, Ren X, Xiang Z, Wan W, Dong Y. Sequencing and characterization of leaf transcriptomes of six diploid Nicotiana species. J Biol Res (Thessalon). 2016;23:6.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. White FF, Garfinkel DJ, Huffman GA, Gordon MP, Nester EW. Sequence homologous to Agrobacterium rhizogenes TDNA in the genomes of uninfected plants. Nature. 1983;301:348.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  3. Suzuki K, Ichiro Y, Nobukazu T. Tobacco plants were transformed by Agrobacterium rhizogenes infection during their evolution. Plant J. 2002;32:5.

    Google Scholar 

  4. Chen K, Dorlhac de Borne F, Szegedi E, Otten L. Deep sequencing of the ancestral tobacco species Nicotiana tomentosiformis reveals multiple T-DNA inserts and a complex evolutionary history of natural transformation in the genus Nicotiana. Plant J. 2014;80:4.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  5. Saitoh F, Kawasima N. The alkaloid contents of sixty Nicotiana species. Phytochemistry. 1985;24:477.

    Article  CAS  Google Scholar 

  6. Doyle JJ, Doyle JL. A rapid DNA isolation procedure for small quantities of fresh leaf tissue. Phytochem Bull. 1987;19:11.

    Google Scholar 

  7. FastQC program. https://www.bioinformatics.babraham.ac.uk/projects/fastqc/. Accessed 12 Jan 2017.

  8. Krueger F. Trim Galore!: a wrapper tool around Cutadapt and FastQC to consistently apply quality and adapter trimming to FastQ files. 2015. http://www.bioinformatics.babraham.ac.uk/projects/trim_galore/. Accessed 12 Jan 2017.

  9. Leggett RM, Clavijo BJ, Clissold L, Clark MD, Caccamo M. NextClip: an analysis and read preparation tool for Nextera Long Mate Pair libraries. Bioinformatics. 2013;30:4.

    Google Scholar 

  10. Zimin AV, Puiu D, Luo MC, Zhu T, Koren S, Marçais G, Yorke JA, Dvořák J, Salzberg SL. Hybrid assembly of the large and highly repetitive genome of Aegilops tauschii, a progenitor of bread wheat, with the MaSuRCA mega-reads algorithm. Genome Res. 2017;27:5.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  11. Sol Genomic Network. https://solgenomics.net. Accessed 25 Feb 2017.

  12. Tarailo-Graovac M, Chen N. Using RepeatMasker to identify repetitive elements in genomic sequences. Curr Protoc Bioinform. 2009;25:4–10.

    Google Scholar 

  13. Kiełbasa SM, Wan R, Sato K, Horton P, Frith MC. Adaptive seeds tame genomic sequence comparison. Genome Res. 2011;21:3.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Authors’ contributions

TM developed the overall project design. GK, PD and TM wrote the paper. GK collected the N. glauca sample and extracted DNA from the sample. GK and DP constructed libraries. DP sequenced the genome of N. glauca. PD assembled the N. glauca genome and analyzed whole genome alignments. GK, PD and TM performed cT-DNA analysis. All authors read and approved the final manuscript.

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Professor Otten (Institut de Biologie Moléculaire des Plantes, Strasbourg) and Professor Lutova (Saint Petersburg University, St. Petersburg) for useful discussion and critical reading of the manuscript.

Competing interests

The authors declare that they have no competing interests.

Availability of data and materials

The assembly sequences are available at DDBJ/ENA/GenBank as WGS project under the Accession PGPE00000000. The SRA for whole-genome sequencing can be accessed at NCBI SRA via Reference Numbers: SRX3419913, SRX3419914, SRX3419915, SRX3419916, SRX3419917, SRX3419918.

Consent for publication

Not applicable.

Data citation

1. Khafizova G, Dobrynin P, Polev D. FigShare https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.6084/m9.figshare.5732427.v1 (2017).

2. Khafizova G, Dobrynin P. FigShare https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.6084/m9.figshare.5645854.v1 (2017).

3. Khafizova G, Matveeva T. FigShare https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.6084/m9.figshare.5754120.v1 (2018).

Ethics approval and consent to participate

Not applicable.

Funding

This paper was supported by a Grant to Tatiana Matveeva from the Russian Science Foundation 16-16-10010 and a Grant from Saint Petersburg State University №1.52.1647.2016.

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Galina Khafizova.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license, and indicate if changes were made. The Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Khafizova, G., Dobrynin, P., Polev, D. et al. Nicotiana glauca whole-genome investigation for cT-DNA study. BMC Res Notes 11, 18 (2018). https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.1186/s13104-018-3127-x

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://0-doi-org.brum.beds.ac.uk/10.1186/s13104-018-3127-x

Keywords