4. Why did I choose this?
Recent
First Indian plan to be sequenced
First genome sequencing done by
Indians
The plant has its own importance in
Indian culture
5. Introduction
Also known as Ocimum
sanctum, holy basil, or tulasi(other
spelling thulasi), is an aromatic plant
in the family Lamiaceae which is
native to the Indian subcontinent and
widespread as a cultivated plant
throughout the Southeast
Asian tropics. .
6. Characteristics of Tulsi
It is an:
erect,
branched sub shrub,
30–60 cm (12–24 in) tall,
hairy stems and
simple phyllotaxic green or purple
leaves that are strongly scented
8. Genome Sequencing of Tulsi
CSIR-Central Institute of
Medicinal & Aromatic
Plants (CSIR-CIMAP),
Lucknow, has published
whole genome sequence
of Ocimum sanctum.
Report was published on May
28, 2015 in BMC Genomics
(2015) 16:413 [DOI
10.1186/s12864-015-1640-z].
9. Who conducted the Project?
Dr. Ajit Kumar Shasany
Sowdhamini Ramanathan
10. Procedure
Plant material, DNA preparation
Library preparation methods
Long and short shot gun library construction
Long reads 454 GS FLX library construction
Mate-pair library construction
Sequencing of shot-gun and mate-pair libraries
and Genome assembly
Gene prediction and annotation
Comparative genomics and SSR prediction
Annotation and de-novo assembly of
chloroplast and mitochondrial genome data
Sequence divergence and phylogenetic
analysis
11. Results
The nuclear genome of Holy basil is the smallest
(386 Mb) in the family Lamiaceae while the
chloroplast genome (142,245 bp) is the smallest in
the order Lamiales.
According to the chloroplast genome similarity, O.
sanctum shows maximum evolutionary closeness
to Salvia miltiorrhiza, a plant of Chinese system of
traditional medicine.
Although, both these plants predominantly produce
phenylpropanoids, and both have the identical
diploid number of chromosomes (2n = 16), the
genome size of O. sanctum (386 Mb) is a little
more than half of the genome size of S. miltiorrhiza
indicating that O. sanctum genome is more
12. Results On an average, 74 % of reads were mapped
back to the assembled genome.
First, they searched for essential eukaryotic
genes in the O. tenuiflorum assembly. This
resulted in the mapping of 85.1 % of complete
core proteins (CEGMA).
Secondly, they searched for the predicted
genes from the final assembly of essential
genes recorded in the DEG database.
Phylogenetic trees for highly conserved
essential genes like glyceraldehyde 3-
phosphate dehydrogenase ,cytochrome P450
and actin from Krishna Tulsi and their respective
homologues were analyzed and compared with
13. Results
Krishna Tulsi genes were found to
cluster with genes belonging to related
species namely, Solanum
lycopersicum, Cucumis sativus and
even with distantly related Arabidopsis
thaliana, indicating that highly
conserved genes, essential to plant
growth and functioning, have been
detected in O. tenuiflorum assemblies.
These trends further support the
quality of the genome assembly
14. Conclusion
The availability of the whole genome
of O.tenuiflorum and our sequence
analysis suggests that small amino
acid changes at the functional sites of
genes involved in metabolite synthesis
pathways confer special medicinal
properties to this herb.
