Selection of appropriate reference genes in eggplant for quantitative gene expression studies under different experimental conditions

Quantitative real-time polymerase chain reaction (RT-qPCR) has become one of the most widely used methods for gene expression analysis, and the evaluation of appropriate reference genes should be the first step to consider in experiments based on RT-qPCR. In this work, nine candidate reference genes, including 18sRNA, CYP, UBQ, GAPDH, TUB, TUA, EF1, ACTIN and RPOB, were investigated for their expression stability in five different eggplant sample pools using three algorithms: geNorm, NormFinder and RefFinder. The samples were collected under different experimental conditions, including those from different plant tissues, hormone treatments, biotic and abiotic stresses. Our results demonstrated that the expression stability varied from different experimental conditions between reference genes. In general, GAPDH and 18sRNA had a good performance under most experimental conditions, whereas TUB and RPOB exhibited poor stability. This study should provide guidelines for the selection of reference genes for gene expression studies in eggplant.