Sequencing of the needle transcriptome from Norway spruce (Picea abies Karst L.) reveals lower substitution rates, but similar selective constraints in gymnosperms compared to angiosperms

Background: A detailed knowledge about which genes are expressed in which tissues and at which developmental stage is important for understanding both the function of genes and their evolution. For the vast majority of species, transcriptomes are still largely uncharacterized and even in those where substantial information is available it is often in the form of partially sequenced transcriptomes. With the development of next generation sequencing, a single experiment can now give both a snap-shot of the transcribed part of a species genome and simultaneously estimate levels of gene expression. Results: mRNA from actively growing needles of Norway spruce (Picea abies) was sequenced using next generation sequencing technology. In total, close to 70 million fragments with a length of 76 bp were sequenced resulting in 5 Gbp of raw data. A de novo assembly of these reads were, together with publicly available expressed sequence tag (EST) data from Norway spruce, used to create a reference transcriptome. Of the 38,419 PUTs (putative unique transcripts) longer than 150 bp in this reference assembly, 59% show similarity to ESTs from other spruce species and of the remaining PUTs, 3,704 show similarity to protein sequences from other plant species, leaving 4,167 PUTs with limited similarity to currently available plant proteins. By predicting coding frames and comparing not only the Norway spruce PUTs, but also PUTs from the close relatives Picea glauca and Picea sitchensis to both Pinus taeda and Taxus mairei, we obtained estimates of synonymous and non-synonymous divergence among conifer species. In addition, we detected close to 15,000 SNPs of high quality and estimated gene expression difference between samples collected during dark and light conditions. Conclusions: Our study yielded a large number of single nucleotide polymorphisms as well as estimates of gene expression on transcriptome scale. In agreement with a recent study we find that the synonymous substitution rate per year (0.6 × 10-09 and 1.1 × 10-09) is an order of magnitude smaller than values reported for angiosperm herbs, but if one takes generation time in to account, most of this difference disappear. The estimates of the non-synonymous over the synonymous divergence (dN/dS ratio) reported here is in general much lower than 1 and only a few genes showed a ratio larger than 1