De Novo Sporophyte Transcriptome Assembly and Functional Annotation in the Endangered Fern Species Vandenboschia speciosa (Willd.) G. Kunkel Bakkali, Mohammed Martín-Blázquez, Rubén Ruiz-Estévez, Mercedes Garrido Ramos, Manuel Ángel Transcriptome Functional annotation Ferns Vandenboschia speciosa We sequenced the sporophyte transcriptome of Killarney fern (Vandenboschia speciosa (Willd.) G. Kunkel). In addition to being a rare endangered Macaronesian-European endemism, this species has a huge genome (10.52 Gb) as well as particular biological features and extreme ecological requirements. These characteristics, together with the systematic position of ferns among vascular plants, make it of high interest for evolutionary, conservation and functional genomics studies. The transcriptome was constructed de novo and contained 36,430 transcripts, of which 17,706 had valid BLAST hits. A total of 19,539 transcripts showed at least one of the 7362 GO terms assigned to the transcriptome, whereas 6547 transcripts showed at least one of the 1359 KEGG assigned terms. A prospective analysis of functional annotation results provided relevant insights on genes involved in important functions such as growth and development as well as physiological adaptations. In this context, a catalogue of genes involved in the genetic control of plant development, during the vegetative to reproductive transition, in stress response as well as genes coding for transcription factors is given. Altogether, this study provides a first step towards understanding the gene expression of a significant fern species and the in silico functional and comparative analyses reported here provide important data and insights for further comparative evolutionary studies in ferns and land plants in general. 2021-07-02T10:36:37Z 2021-07-02T10:36:37Z 2021 info:eu-repo/semantics/article Bakkali, M.; Martín-Blázquez, R.; Ruiz-Estévez, M.; Garrido-Ramos, M.A. De Novo Sporophyte Transcriptome Assembly and Functional Annotation in the Endangered Fern Species Vandenboschia speciosa (Willd.) G. Kunkel. Genes 2021, 12, 1017. https://doi.org/10.3390/ genes12071017 http://hdl.handle.net/10481/69472 10.3390/genes12071017 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/es/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución 3.0 España MDPI