Transcriptome Sequencing of Two Kentucky Bluegrass (Poa pratensis L.) Genotypes in Response to Heat Stress

Kentucky bluegrass (Poa pratensis L.) (KBG) is a major cool-season turfgrass. However, as its complex genetic background and production modes, limited genomic and transcriptomic information of KBG was known so far. In this study, a transcriptome study between wild type material Ninglan (summer stress sensitive) and cultivar material KBG03 (summer stress tolerant) was conducted, under optimal (25 °C) and high (40 °C) temperatures. A total of 81.42 Gb clean reads were generated and de novo assembled into 110,784 unigenes with an average length of 1,105 bp. About 50% KBG unigenes were similar to the non-redundant (NR) database. Among the NR BLASTx top hits, 27.47% unigenes were matched to Brachypodium distachyon. After heat stress, a massive amount of unigenes showed significantly differential expression in both genotypes. After 2h heat stress, more specially up-regulated differentially expressed unigenes (DEGs) and less down-regulated DEGs were detected in Ninglan than in KBG03. At 24h, the expression of 1710 and 730 unigenes were increased and decreased uniquely in Ninglan, and 1361 up-regulated DEGs and 757 down-regulated DEGs were just found in KBG03. More heat shock proteins (HSPs) and heat shock transcription factors (HSFs) DEGs were also identified at 2h than 24h in both genotypes. In addition, by Gene Ontology (GO) enrichment analysis, three core terms (“protein folding”, “response to heat”, and “response to hydrogen peroxide”) of biological process (BP) ontology were found in both genotypes under different heat stress time. The DEGs shared in both genotypes might be related to the basic mechanism of thermal response in KBG.