Transcriptome response of wheat Norin 10 to long-term elevated CO2 under high yield field condition

The increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration, caused by fossil fuel combustion and deforestation, plays an important role in plant growth and development. Wheat, as a major staple crop, adapts to climate change by tuning its inherent molecular mechanism, which is not well understood. The present study employed the RNA-Seq method to generate transcriptome profiles of the wheat Norin 10 in response to elevated CO2 in comparison with ambient CO2. The 10 895 787 high-quality clean reads of Norin 10 were assembled de novo using Trinity (without a reference genome) resulting in a total of 18 206 candidate transcripts with significant BLAST matches. GO enrichment analysis of Norin 10 at different CO2 concentrations showed that some functional genes related to plastids, precursor metabolites, and energy, thylakoid and photosynthesis were apparently enriched at elevated CO2 (550 µmol mol−1) in contrast to that at ambient CO2 (400 µmol mol−1); these findings were further confirmed by RT-PCR analysis. The findings demonstrated the specific effects of elevated CO2 during long-term period in free air CO2 enrichment (FACE) on transcriptome response of the high yielding wheat variety, Norin 10, which has a large spike.