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The genus Cymbopogon comprises neocosmopolitan grasses widely used as medicinal plants and in the perfume, pharmaceutical and herbal product industries. Despite their economic relevance, these species are still considered orphan crops, with limited phytotechnical, genomic and evolutionary studies within the Poaceae family. In this study, we investigated the evolutionary relationships of Cymbopogon flexuosus and Cymbopogon winterianus, with a focus on differences in gene expression associated with the biosynthesis of secondary metabolites. De novo transcriptome assembly yielded 25,576 transcripts in C. flexuosus and 42,250 in C. winterianus. A total of 5318 and 8631 more informative differentially expressed transcripts (DETs) were identified in each mapping, among which 76 and 94 were associated with secondary metabolism pathways. When mapping the libraries against related species, the highest percentages of mapped reads per transcriptome and per gene (depth) were observed in Andropogon gerardi, Sorghum bicolor, Saccharum officinarum, Miscanthus sinensis, Miscanthus lutarioriparius and Zea mays. These results indicate A. gerardi, S. bicolor and Z. mays as the most promising genomic models for future studies within the genus Cymbopogon. Comparison of the expression of transcripts that are homologous to the precursor enzymes of terpenoids, phenylpropanoids, flavonoids and other secondary metabolites revealed a complex and non-linear interaction between the metabolic pathways in each species and it was not possible to predict the predominance of greater expression of a class of metabolites on a given species.
Maia et al. (Tue,) studied this question.