CO: Glycyrrhiza uralensis transcriptome landscape and study of phytochemicals. Plant Cell Physiol 2013

Medicinal and industrial properties of phytochemicals (e.g. glycyrrhizin) from the root of Glycyrrhiza uralensis (licorice plant) made it an attractive, multimillion-dollar trade item. Bioengineering is one of the solutions to overcome such high market demand and to protect plants from ex-tinction. Unfortunately, limited genomic information on medicinal plants restricts their research and thus biosyn-thetic mechanisms of many important phytochemicals are still poorly understood. In this work we utilized the de novo (no reference genome sequence available) assembly of Illumina RNA-Seq data to study the transcriptome of the licorice plant. Our analysis is based on sequencing results of libraries constructed from samples belonging to different tissues (root and leaf) and collected in differ-ent seasons and from two distinct strains (low and hig