Identification of SSRs in Gardenia jasminoides Ellis de novo transcriptomic analysis

Gardenia jasminoides Ellis is one of the most economically important pot plants for the floral market in Greece. A previous study has shown that the Greek gardenia ('Pelion') has very low genetic variability and that the cultivated clones can be considered as a commercial cultivar with high genetic uniformity. In order to further analyse this uniformity and to develop SSRs molecular markers, total RNA was extracted from floral petals and sequenced by using the Illumina HiSeq2000 (TM) platform. As a result, 57,503 unigenes were generated, leading to the identification of 9,549 Simple Sequence Repeats in 7,641 trancripts. The vast majority of these SSRs were monomers, dimers and trimers, while 1,398 sequences contained more than one SSRs. Also, according to the analysis 2,034 SSRs can give amplification products at 140-160 bp size. Further research is needed in order to evaluate the polymorphism of these markers found and to estimate the PIC values, so that they can be applied in SSRs studies and HRM (High Resolution Melting) analysis as well as to evaluate the genetic variation and erosion of the species and the cultivated clones.