Comparative transcriptomic, proteomic, and amino acid content analyses of quinoa (Chenopodium quinoa) seed accessions from diverse geographic locations

We analyzed the quinoa seed transcriptome of four different accessions by aligning the RNA-seq results with the second version of the QQ74 genome (QQ74-V2). After filtering and normalizing 29,355 transcripts, we observed that QQ74 was most distinct compared to NWA accessions. Subsequently, we performed a transcript differential analysis in the ten pairwise comparisons and identified a total of 3,014 differentially expressed genes (DEGs). A Gene Ontology (GO) enrichment analysis of these DEGs showed that the accession representing the NWA transition area was enriched in terms related to oxidative phosphorylation and heat response. Furthermore, using 2D-gel electrophoresis followed by mass spectrometry, we demonstrated that storage proteins, specifically 11S globulin, 13S globulin and vicilin-like antimicrobial peptides, were the most abundant proteins in quinoa seeds of the five accessions. In addition, we observed that some of these proteins were differentially expressed between accessions. In terms of total amino acid content, statistically significant differences between some of the accessions were found only for lysine and leucine. Fil: Barberini, María Laura. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Instituto de Investigaciones en Ingeniería Genética y Biología Molecular "Dr. Héctor N. Torres"; Argentina Fil: Lee, Yun Sun. Michigan State University; Estados Unidos. Seoul National University; Corea del Sur