On October 17, 2019, a teamwork research article entitled “Multi-strategic RNA-seq analysis reveals a high-resolution transcriptional landscape in cotton” from Academician Zhu Yuxian’ lab and Professor Zhou Yu’s lab in the College of Life Sciences of Wuhan University was published in Nature Communications. Associate Professor Wang Kun and graduate student Wang Dehe are the co-first authors of the paper. Academician Zhu Yuxian and Professor Zhou Yu are the co-corresponding authors of the paper.

Cotton is an important natural fiber crop, however, its comprehensive and high-resolution gene map is lacking. This study integrate four complementary high-throughput techniques, including Pacbio long read Iso-seq, strand-specific RNA-seq, CAGE-seq, and PolyA-seq, to systematically explore the transcription landscape across 16 tissues or different organ types in Gossypium arboreum. This study filled the gaps in the fine transcriptional annotation of the diploid cotton genome in the world, and obtained the most accurate and complex transcriptional landscape of the Asian cotton genome. The annotations provide valuable resources for further functional genomic research. And the research also reveals some new phenomena and mechanisms in the transcriptional regulation of plants, which providing new research ideas for plants RNA research.

Links: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-019-12575-x