Transcriptome analysis of critical genes related to flowering in Mikania micrantha at different altitudes provides insights for a potential control

Background: Mikania micrantha is a vine with strong invasion ability, and its strong sexual reproduction ability is not only the main factor of harm, but also a serious obstacle to control. Therefore, inhibiting the flowering and seed production of M. micrantha is an effective strategy to prevent M. micrantha from continuing to invade. Result: The flowering number of M. micrantha is different at different altitudes. A total of 67.01 Gb clean data were obtained from nine cDNA libraries, and more than 83.47% of the clean reads were mapped to the reference genome. In total, 5878 and 7686 significantly differentially expressed genes (DEGs) were found in E2-vs-E9 and E13-vs-E9, respectively. Based on the background annotation and gene expression, some candidate genes related to flowering pathway were initially screened, their expression levels in the three different altitudes in flower bud differentiation showed the same trend, that is, at an altitude of 1300 meters, the flower integration gene and flower meristem gene were down-regulated (such as SOC1 and AP1), and the flowering inhibition gene was up-regulated (such as FRI and SVP). Additional, the results show that there were many DEGs involved in hormone signal transduction pathway in the flower bud differentiation of M. micrantha at different altitudes. Conclusions: Our results provide abundant sequence resources for clarifying the underlying mechanisms of the flower bud differentiation and mining the key factors to inhibit the flowering and seed production of M. micrantha , so as to provide technical support for the discovery of an efficient control method.