Bioinformatics analysis of Gerbera (Gerbera hybrid) cut flower EST sequences to determining genes involved in resistance to Botrytis disease

Biotic stresses such as Botrytis Disease are the main obstacles in the production of gerbera flowers. In order to identify the genes related to resistance against Botrytis, EST analysis of Gerbera cDND library was performed. 1920 EST sequences of the Gerbera library, infected with Botrytis, from NCBI Genbank were used. All EST sequences were trimmed initially, clustering and assembling that resulted in 1139 unigenes (361 Contigs and 778 Singletons). BLAST X revealed that 688 unigene had significant hit among the Arabidopsis protein database, whereas the remaining unigenes displayed no significant match with no hit. Classifying and gene enrichment analysis of Gerbera EST sequences library with PANTHER software, based on molecular functions, protein classes, and cellular components, put them into 10, 25 and 6 different functional groups, respectively, where 6 groups of them were statistically significant at α=0.01.Gene network of high expression Contigs, revealed that MYB transcription factor family (e.s. MYB73¡ ATMYB21, RHC1A) that strongly influenced by the Jasmonic Acid pathway, antioxidants genes, genes involved in Ca signaling (e.s. CAM7) and UBQ protein family have a large share of regulatory networks and play a key role in resistance to Botrytis disease. The genes identified in this study could be good candidates for manipulating the resistance to botrytis disease in Gerbera.