Author(s)

Duruvasula Sree Lekha¹, Kandasamy Ulaganathan^1*, Mulpuri Sujatha²

¹Centre for Plant Molecular Biology, Osmania University, Hyderabad, India.
²ICAR-Indian Institute of Oilseeds Research, Rajendranagar, Hyderabad, India.

Sunflower is one of the most used commercial oilseed crops and suffers due to Powdery mildew. RNA sequence alteration occurs due to RNA editing which is a post transcriptional modification. It causes a deviation from the genomic DNA sequence resulting in RNA-DNA differences. Accurate study of RNA editing events in diverse species is possible by NGS based methods. Here, we performed RNA sequencing of 12 leaf transcriptomes, which include three genotypes of Helianthus annuus (2023B, TX16R and ID25), H. debilis, H. niveus, and H. praecox along with their respective powdery mildew pathogen infected variants and systematically analysed the mitochondrial RNA editing events using computational reference-based mapping approach. We discovered 687 editing sites, 220 editing events in the protein-coding regions, among all species and genotypes considered in this study. These included “C to U” and “U to C” RNA editing events. On further analysis, we observed that these editing events include 14 different types of amino acid changes that involve the creation of two stop codon events. The conserved editing sites identified were 247 accounting for ~36% of all the editing sites identified. This study provides a detailed picture of the Helianthus species’ mitochondrial RNA editing status. We have identified and characterized for the first time, genotype-specific, species-specific, and stress-specific RNA editing events which may be useful as a potential source for stress-responsive studies in the future.

Helianthus annuus, RNA Editing, RNA-seq, H. niveus, H. debilis, H. praecox, Biotic Stress, Powdery Mildew

Lekha, D. , Ulaganathan, K. and Sujatha, M. (2023) In-Silico Identification and Differential Analysis of Mitochondrial RNA Editing Events in Helianthus Genotypes/Species and Powdery Mildew Infected Variants. American Journal of Plant Sciences, 14, 1464-1479. doi: 10.4236/ajps.2023.1412099.