The salinity tolerant poplar database (STPD): a comprehensive database for studying tree salt-tolerant adaption and poplar genomics

Ma et al. BMC Genomics The salinity tolerant poplar database (STPD): a comprehensive database for studying tree salt-tolerant adaption and poplar genomics Yazhen Ma 0 Ting Xu 0 Dongshi Wan 0 Tao Ma Sheng Shi Jianquan Liu Quanjun Hu 0 Equal contributors Molecular Ecology Group, State Key Laboratory of Grassland and Agro-Ecosystems, School of Life Sciences, Lanzhou University , Lanzhou 730000Gansu , China Background: Soil salinity is a significant factor that impairs plant growth and agricultural productivity, and numerous efforts are underway to enhance salt tolerance of economically important plants. Populus species are widely cultivated for diverse uses. Especially, they grow in different habitats, from salty soil to mesophytic environment, and are therefore used as a model genus for elucidating physiological and molecular mechanisms of stress tolerance in woody plants. Description: The Salinity Tolerant Poplar Database (STPD) is an integrative database for salt-tolerant poplar genome biology. Currently the STPD contains Populus euphratica genome and its related genetic resources. P. euphratica, with a preference of the salty habitats, has become a valuable genetic resource for the exploitation of tolerance characteristics in trees. This database contains curated data including genomic sequence, genes and gene functional information, non-coding RNA sequences, transposable elements, simple sequence repeats and single nucleotide polymorphisms information of P. euphratica, gene expression data between P. euphratica and Populus tomentosa, and whole-genome alignments between Populus trichocarpa, P. euphratica and Salix suchowensis. The STPD provides useful searching and data mining tools, including GBrowse genome browser, BLAST servers and genome alignments viewer, which can be used to browse genome regions, identify similar sequences and visualize genome alignments. Datasets within the STPD can also be downloaded to perform local searches. Conclusions: A new Salinity Tolerant Poplar Database has been developed to assist studies of salt tolerance in trees and poplar genomics. The database will be continuously updated to incorporate new genome-wide data of related poplar species. This database will serve as an infrastructure for researches on the molecular function of genes, comparative genomics, and evolution in closely related species as well as promote advances in molecular breeding within Populus. The STPD can be accessed at http://me.lzu.edu.cn/stpd/. Salt-tolerant; Populus; Genome database; Tree adaptation; Abiotic stress - Background Salinity is a main environmental constraint that renders fields unproductive. It is also one of the most severe abiotic stress factors affecting plant growth and agricultural production worldwide [1]. To cope with this intractable problem, many researches have been undertaken to explore the physiological and molecular mechanisms of plants that naturally display high salt resistance or use plant breeding and biotechnological approaches to enhance the stress resistance of salt-sensitive plant species, especially those with significant economic importance [2-5]. The genus Populus is widely distributed and consists of many species that play important parts in bio-energy production, environmental protection and afforestation on degraded soils [6]. In addition to their conspicuous economic values, these woody species also exhibit different degrees of stress resistance as a consequence of adaptation to different habitats [7,8], thus being very suitable to address tree-specific questions of salt stress tolerance [9]. Populus euphratica Oliv. is a salinity tolerant poplar, which occurs in semiarid and arid areas [10]. It grows under unfavorable conditions such as saline soils, but sustains higher photosynthetic and growth rates than other poplar species under high salinity [3,11]. With the extraordinary adaptation to salt stress, it has become a model for elucidating salt resistance mechanisms in trees [12]. Breeders have tried to increase tree salt tolerance by crossing P. euphratica with other economical species. However, successful hybridization with positive features is scarce [7]. Therefore, molecular breeding provides a promising alternative. Based on the recently completed whole genome sequence of the P. euphratica [12], we have built a comprehensive web-based database, STPD (http://me.lzu. edu.cn/stpd/), to facilitate researches on salinity tolerance and molecular breeding of Populus. Construction and content The STPD currently gives public access to P. euphratica genome assembly version 1.1, which was sequenced and assembled using the fosmid pooling and hierarchical approach. The final assembly covers a total length of 496.5 Mb [12], and 34,279 protein-coding genes were predicted in the whole genome. In addition, 764 transfer RNAs, 706 ribosomal RNAs, 4,826 small nuclear RNAs and 266 microRNAs that supported by small RNA sequencing data were identified and included in the database. We also incorporated gene expression data, which is based on time-course profiling of differentially expressed genes between P. euphratica and Populus tomentosa (a salt-sensitive poplar) in response to salt stress. Moreover, a total of 18,938 universal pairs of simple sequence repeat (SSRs) primers were identified in the syntenic regions of P. euphratica and Populus trichocarpa, and these SSRs can be converted into genetic markers across most poplar species. The STPD includes GBrowse genome browser, gene search function, BLAST sequence searching and other intuitive tools to facilitate the analysis of the genetic data in salt-tolerant Populus (Figure 1). Genome component Repeated sequences within the P. euphratica genome were identified by RepeatMasker (http://www.repeatmasker. org) with two different libraries. The first one is Repbase TE library (http://www.girinst.org/repbase) while the second one was produced by RepeatModeler, which yielded classification information for each repeat family and consensus sequences as a repeat library. Gene component We obtained the gene dataset of P. euphratica using a variety of strategies, including RNA-seq, homology and ab initio gene prediction. The total predicted gene number is 34,279. Among these, 20038 (58.46%) genes are supported by RNA-seq and 32182 (93.88%) have a homologue either in Ricinus communis, Cucumis sativus, P. trichocarpa or Prunus persica [12]. This combined gene dataset was then used as a reference and has been integrated into the STPD. The genes were annotated with a variety of databases including Swiss-Prot/TrEMBL (http://www.uniprot.org), KEGG (http://www.genome.jp/kegg), InterPro (http://www. ebi.ac.uk/interpro) and Gene Ontology (http://geneontology. org). Swiss-Prot and TrEMBL annotations for the predicted proteins were generated by performing BLASTP searching (E-value 105) against the Swiss-Prot and TrEMBL databases. Genes were mapped to KEGG pathway using KAAS [13]. We also used (...truncated)