world-biotechnology-2017-scientifictracks-abstracts

12 / 39

conferenceseries .com
Page 37
Notes:
Volume 7, Issue 6 (Suppl) J Biotechnol Biomater, an open access journal
ISSN: 2155-952X World Biotechnology 2017
December 04-05, 2017
2nd World Biotechnology Congress
December 04-05, 2017 | Sao Paulo, Brazil
RNA-Seq analysis of aluminum stress response in sugarcane roots
Kameswara Rao Kottapalli1, Poornasree Kumar1 and Sonia Marli Zingaretti2
1Texas Tech University, USA
2Universidade de Ribeirão Preto, Brazil
Sugarcane (Saccharum spp.) is an important source of sugar and ethanol and it is known that the global sugarcane production will
increase by 21% by 2024. With increasing demand for energy, the sugarcane crop expansion is evident in Brazil. It is predicted
that due to high demand for sugarcane and ethanol, the acreage under sugarcane will increase from 9.0 million ha to 64 million ha by
the years 2018/2019. As a result, more unconventional soils rich in minerals will be brought under cultivation. Aluminum ions (Al+3)
together with silicon and iron are the three most abundant mineral elements in soil. Although silicon and iron are required for plant
growth, Al is toxic, and its bioavailability is highest on acidic soils, resulting in inhibition of root growth and architecture leading to
disruption of root elongation. Our goal is to understand the molecular mechanisms of abiotic stress tolerance in sugarcane and the
role of miRNA’s in transcriptional regulation. Towards this goal, a relatively tolerant sugarcane cultivar CTC-2 and the susceptible
RB855453 cultivar was subjected to Aluminum stress at 221 µMol. RNA-Seq was performed on 12 root tissue samples using 108
bp paired end sequencing on an Illumina HiSeq2500 sequencer. Pairwise comparisons between different treatments in tolerant
cultivar identified 16,340 non-redundant differentially expressed transcripts (DETs). Functional annotation of DETs revealed that
AL+3 tolerance was controlled by several interacting pathways like calcium and G-protein coupled receptor mediated signaling, and
regulation by WRKY and R2R3-MYB transcription factors. Some of these genes could be utilized by sugarcane breeders to improve
Al+3 stress tolerance in field conditions.
Biography
Kameswara Rao Kottapalli has completed his PhD in Biotechnology and currently, he is a Research Associate Professor in Center for Biotechnology and Genomics. He
has more than 10 years of experience in functional genomics with expertise in bioinformatics analysis of genotypic data, microarray data, large protein mass data, and
next-generation DNA sequence data. He has successfully obtained federal grants like USDA-AFRI, NSF, Borlaug-USDA International award, USDA Ogallala Aquifer
Initiative with major focus on bioinformatics and functional genomics. He has more than 25 publications in peer-reviewed journals and was awarded International Generation
Challenge Program Postdoctoral Fellow in 2005-06. He currently teaches two graduate courses on gene expression profiling by nextgen sequencing (BTEC 5312) and
bioinformatics (BTEC 5001-04). He is currently supervising several MS and PhD students with research focus on functional genomics and bioinformatics.
Kameswara Rao Kottapalli et al., J Biotechnol Biomater 2017, 7:6 (Suppl)
DOI: 10.4172/2155-952X-C1-085