[Assembling of an ammonium transporter gene in Salicornia europaea by expression pattern analysis of Unigene in...

RNA-seq can help us quickly obtain the whole transcriptome sequences of species under different conditions. Many Unigenes that are assembled by raw reads always do not contain complete open reading frame (ORF). In addition, it also has some redundancy in transcriptome library. Some Unigenes in the library, although belong to one transcript, cannot be assembled without overlapping. We found five incomplete Unigenes annotated ammonium transporter (AMT) from Salicornia europaea transcriptome, in which two Unigenes (Uni4 and Uni5) had identical expression patterns across four transcriptomes. The two Unigenes may come from one transcript. Analyzing the Unigene position of transcript by NCBI blastx, we found that Uni4 and Uni5 respectively located in 5' end and 3' end compared with the reference transcript, and an unknown gap of 120 bp may exist in a hypothetic transcript to which Uni4 and Uni5 both belong. To verify the hypothesis, single forward primer and single reverse primers were respectively designed on Uni4 and Uni5, and a fragment with about 800 bp was generated by PCR. Then it was sequenced and aligned with Uni4 and Uni5. Finally, we assembled a sequence with 1 667 bp, which contains a complete ORF (1 482 bp, coding 494 amino acids). It belongs to amt1 subfamily and was named Seamt1 via the phylogenetic analysis. It was pointed by bioinformatics tools that SeAMT1 protein conformed to the AMT characteristics of other species. This work clustered expression pattern to explore the Unigenes of one transcript, and the feasibility of this method was validated through the other two groups of Unigenes. The handy method will benefit extension and assembling of Unigene in transcriptome, it also helps achieve the complete ORF and gene function.