Generation and gene ontology based analysis of expressed sequence tags (EST) from a Panax ginseng C. A. Meyer roots

Panax ginseng C. A. Meyer is a perennial herb from the Araliaceae family. Traditionally used as a medicinal plant in Oriental medicine for more than thousand years. Ginsenosides are the major therapeutic components in ginseng roots. Roots of the ginseng plant have more commercial value and based on the age. No genomic data available till now. In this study, transcriptome analysis for hairy root, 14 year root, 4 year root get insight in to ginsenoside pathway and genes responsible for long survival and stress. Totally 6,757 Expressed Sequence Tags (EST) was obtained from cDNA libraries. Clustering of those ESTs returned 1,037 contigs and 3,445 singlets for a total of 4,482 putative unigenes. Use of bioinformatics methods 85% of EST sequence was well annotated towards reeds one dimensional concept. The unique transcripts were functionally classified by using Gene Ontology (GO) hierarchy, Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG), KEGG orthology and structural domain data from biological database. Isoprenoid and putative ginsenoside pathway genes were discussed. EST dataset provides a wide outlook of the genes expressed in hairy roots, 14 years root and 4 years root. The dataset contains more than 1,365 EST sequences related to plant secondary metabolism and 745 sequences related to stresses. This study will improve the genetic engineering of ginseng plant and ginsenosides rich plant development. One dimensional data will lead to the two and three dimensional data.