Japan’s scientists have created a contiguous genomic assembly for the red variety. Perilla frutescensThis is an important herb plant that contains hundreds of bioactive chemical. The two most significant bioactive substances in this plant are perillaldehyde (the main one) and rosmarinic Acid (the second).
Red perilla cultivar Hoko-3 Photo credit to Mishima Foods Co. Ltd.
Perilla frutescens Lamiaceae is an annual herb plant that is commonly cultivated in Asia.
Based on their content of anthocyanins, there are two kinds of perilla plant: green and red.
The Japanese name for red perilla is “aka-shiso” in Japanese. It is an anthocyanin rich variety that has dark purple or violet leaves and stems. Green perilla, which is called “ao-jiso” in Japanese, is an anthocyanin insufficient variety.
You can use both green and red perilla leaves for your cooking.
Red perilla leaves are especially used to treat stomach issues in traditional Kampo medicine.
Oil is also made from the seeds, and it’s a good source of alpha-linolenic acids.
Red perilla’s medicinal and nutritional benefits could be enhanced by increasing the production of valuable compounds through manipulation of regulatory genes or key enzymes using genome editing technology.
Hiroshima University Professor Hidemasa bono stated that gene editing red perilla to provide better traits was one promising way to use this plant more efficiently.
High-quality sequences of genomes from the targeted species are required to do this.
Ofessor Bono, along with his colleagues, collected genetic material from Hoko-3’s young hydroponically-grown leaves for their research. This is a particular cultivar of the species. Perilla frutescens.
The data from Hoko-3 show that Hoko-3 has high genetic similarity between plants, partly because Hoko-3 can be self-fertilized, which makes it a great candidate for gene editing.
“We were able to achieve a very contiguous red perilla genome assembly using PacBio HiFi readings,” stated Dr. Keita Yamaura from Hiroshima University.
“We anchor 99.2% into 20 pseudochromosomes. Seven pseudochromosomes were composed of one segment and seven of them contained one.”
We functionally annotated 72.983 genes using a Fanflow4Plants-developed workflow for functional annotation. This is out of 76.825 proteins coding genes.
The authors employed two different complementary methods to annotate the genes of the genome assembly. Each process has its own strengths and weaknesses in sequence.
The combined number of gene model annotations from two evidence-based annotations with the gene prediction technique (BRAKER2) in this study was 86.258, almost double the previous total Perilla frutescens genome (43.527 genes), and is close to that reported for another Lamiaceae species. Salvia splendens They said that there were 88,489 genes.
Dr. Tamura stated that the genome assembly and functional annotations obtained from this study would be used to mine target genes for red perilla genome editing.
It could be possible for the plant to accumulate more valuable phytochemicals.
These results were made available online by the journal DNA Research.
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Keita Tamura The authors and others. Red perilla genome (a highly connected assembly)Perilla frutescens() Domesticated in Japan DNA Research, published online November 16, 2022; doi: 10.1093/dnares/dsac044