Identification of the Genes Related to the Biosynthesis of Major Secondary Metabolites and Seed Oil through Transcriptome Sequencing of the Fruit Tissues of Bitter Gourd Momordica Charantia L

Abstract

Bitter gourd (Momordica charantia L.) is cultivated as a vegetable crop, and it is known as balsam pear, African cucumber, bitter apple, bitter melon, or karela, depending on the place and region. Fruits of M. charantia consist of 60 different phytochemicals used to treat various diseases, and it is considered a rich source of proteins and other essential amino acids. The seeds contain 35 to 40% oil, rich in and#945;-eleostearic acid (55-62%). This oil also holds various medicinal properties, including anti-diabetic, anti-lipidemic, anti-cancer, and anti-microbial. It is also used in industry for manufacturing paints, inks, and coating materials. Despite its greater clinical and industrial importance, genomics studies in understanding seed oil biosynthesis and the genes involved are limited and not much explored. So, our study was designed to investigate the transcriptome from different tissues of bitter fruit and to identify the seed oil biosynthesis genes. We generated 296 million raw reads from the green rind, white rind, pulp, immature seed, and the mature seed of bitter gourd fruit tissue. After pre-processing, 255 million high-quality reads were assembled using Trinity and clustered using CD-HIT. We generated 125,566 transcripts with N50 of 2751 bp and gene completeness of 84%. The assembled transcripts were validated by reverse transcription PCR. Gene expression analysis using qRT-PCR correlated with the expression levels estimated based on the FPKM values newline