LAUSR

Leek is an economically important vegetable. In model plants, the CONSTANS (CO) and CONSTANS-like (COL) genes play central roles in plant flowering modulation. However, none of leek CO homolog has been identified, because of limited gene resources obtained in this crop. Here, we reported the transcriptome analysis of leek, along with the identification of putative leek CONSTANS-like (COL) (ApCOL) genes. A total of 189 713 non-redundant transcripts were de novo assembled by using about 128.9 million clean sequence reads, of which, 48 621 were achieved for functional annotation. Thereafter, the search for putative ApCOL genes against the assembled transcripts was performed, and 17 genes were identified. The 17 putative ApCOL proteins, together with 16 function-known COL proteins published for other species, were subjected to phylogenetic analysis and divided into four groups. Some putative ApCOL members showed high sequence similarity with published COL proteins involved in flowering regulation. Expression analysis revealed that, among the 17 putative ApCOL genes, eight, two, and three genes showed higher expression in leaves, cauloids, and roots, respectively. The discovery of putative ApCOL genes and the characterization of their expression patterns will provide a basis for future clarification of their functions in leek growth and development.