Transcriptome assembly, gene expression, and SSR marker analysis in drought- tolerant peanut cultivar L14

Abstract Through transcriptomic sequencing and analysis of the drought-tolerant peanut cultivar L14, we obtained a high-quality transcriptome assembly and annotation of over 71,000 unigenes with an average N50 length of 1484 bp. Based on BLAST searches against the Non-redundant, Uniprot, KEGG, Pfam, GO, and Hayai-Annotation Plants databases, putative functions were assigned to 47,820 unigenes (68% of the total). Important candidate genes involved in abiotic stress tolerance were identified. To understand the transcriptional regulation of the drought tolerance pathway in peanut, transcript expression of genes belonging to the APETALA2/ethylene responsive factor, LEAs, Phospholipase D and C families from the transcriptomic data were analyzed using a heatmap. Furthermore, the expression of LEA5 was analyzed by RT-PCR under treatment with varying concentrations of PEG 6000. This study provides additional valuable information about the transcriptome and genes related to drought tolerance, helping to better understand the molecular mechanism underlying drought tolerance in peanuts, which may aid in efforts to improve this crop.