De novo transcriptome assembly and characterization of the 10-hydroxycamptothecin-producing Xylaria sp. M71 following salicylic acid treatment.

In the present study, we identified genes that are putatively involved in the production of fungal 10-hydroxycamptothecin via transcriptome sequencing and characterization of the Xylaria sp. M71 treated with salicylic acid (SA). A total of 60,664,200 raw reads were assembled into 26,044 unigenes. BLAST assigned 8,767 (33.7%) and 10,840 (41.6%) unigenes to 40 Gene Ontology (GO) annotations and 108 Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes (KEGG) pathways, respectively. A total of 3,713 unigenes comprising 1,504 upregulated and 2,209 downregulated unigenes were found to be differentially expressed between SA-induced and control fungi. Based on the camptothecin biosynthesis pathway in plants, 13 functional genes of Xylaria sp. M71 were mapped to the mevalonate (MVA) pathway, suggesting that the fungal 10-hydroxycamptothecin is produced via the MVA pathway. In summary, analysis of the Xylaria sp. M71 transcriptome allowed the identification of unigenes that are putatively involved in 10-hydroxycamptothecin biosynthesis in fungi.