Phenylpropanoid gene expression analysis in saffron using transcriptome data

Today, saffron is a known strategic plant in agricultural. It knowns as the most expensive spice and also has several medical usage in traditional medicine. One of the most important usage of saffron is in cancer prevention and cancer therapy. In this study data were downloaded from website NCBI short read archive, which contains five different tissue mRNA sequences, stigma, tepal, leaf, corm and stamen. After downloading raw data, quality control and trimming were done. Then, gene expression quantification was done using RSEM software, and finally blastx was applied between reference assembled transcriptome and some of known genes in phenylpropanoid biosynthesis pathway. In this study, for the first time we report expression of CAD1 which codes the Cinnamoldehyde enzyme, it has several reports on its anticancer and anti-tumor effects. The expression level of CAD1 was high in Stigma and Tepal, which means Stigma could be used as anti-cancer drugs as well as its spice.